Abstract
Ryder, N., & Leinonen, E. (2014). Pragmatic language development in language impaired and typically developing children: Incorrect answers in context. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 43, 45–58.
The difficulties that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have in making inferences have been well documented (Bishop & Adams, 1992; Crais & Chapman, 1987; Ford & Milosky, 2003; Karasinski & Weismer, 2010). On both verbal and visually presented stories, children with SLI make fewer total inferences and more inference errors than typically developing children. This study asked the following questions about the ability of children with SLI to respond to tasks requiring inferences:
Do the incorrect answers of children with SLI reflect an inability to integrate relevant information from the scenario when answering pragmatically demanding questions?
Do the incorrect answer strategies of children with SLI reflect developmental delay (with similar answers to those of younger typically developing children)?
Within the SLI group, do the incorrect answer strategies of children with pragmatic language difficulties (PLD) reflect more specific difficulties in using relevant context compared with children without pragmatic difficulties?
The Study
Participants
A total of 97 children participated in this study. There were 30 children with SLI between the ages of 7 and 11 years. In the SLI group were 12 children with primarily PLD. There were 67 typically developing monolingual children with no known language difficulties from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. There were two age groups: 32 children aged between 5 years 0 months and 6 years 0 months and 35 children aged between 7 years 0 months and 11 years 0 months.
The children with SLI had a diagnosis of SLI on the basis of no evidence of neurological, sensorimotor, nonverbal cognitive, or social emotional deficits and a score of 1 SD below the norm on at least one standard language test. The children with PLD were identified from the rest of the children with SLI (without PLD) on the basis of their performance on standard language assessments as part of their speech and language therapy and on the basis of their performance.
Tasks and Methods
Two tasks were used with different contexts. The first was a verbal scenario including two short sentences read aloud followed by a question. No other contextual information was available. The second task was a storybook task which included pictures of the characters and the background scenes. As in the verbal scenario condition, the story was read aloud. Both tasks required combining the scenario/story information and generating an inference to answer successfully.
Verbal Only: The researcher read aloud the scenario on 10 cards (one at a time) to the child and asked a question targeting implicature on the basis of the short scenario. For example, children might hear a sentence such as “Freddie helped his dad paint the fence. Freddie had to put on old clothes,” and were asked the question, “Why did Freddie put on old clothes?” The child was required to answer verbally. The answers require integrating the information from both sentences and using world knowledge. The context is verbal only.
Storybook: A short story was read aloud to the child and eight color pictures accompanied the story, but answers to questions were not in the pictures. Seven implicature questions were asked intermittently throughout the story. The questions in the storybook were asked immediately after the relevant text was read, and were designed to keep interruption to the flow of the story to a minimum. The questions were kept as grammatically simple as possible using the same structures as the storybook text.
The children’s incorrect answers were analyzed into five categories. Following is a list of the categories with an example based on incorrect responses to “Why did Freddie put on old clothes?”
Story/scenario context: The child had used the storybook information or the scenario information but did not focus on the essence of the question appropriately.
“His dad might’ve told him to.”
World knowledge: The question triggered the child to use world knowledge and experience of similar situations but the child did not address the focus of the question.
“Because he doesn’t like his new clothes.”
Irrelevant: The child gave an answer which was not relevant in the given context and did not appear to be the result of world knowledge/experience or reflect an ability to consider the focus of the question.
“Because he found them.”
Do not know: The child said he or she did not know the answer.
No response/tautological: Either no response at all or child repeated words verbatim from question or scenario.
Results
Data were analyzed for typically developing (TD) children, children who had SLI with pragmatic language disorder (SLI+PLD), children who had SLI without pragmatic language difficulties (SLI-PLD), and all the children with language impairment (SLI).
For all groups, the verbal task elicited more incorrect answers than the storybook task but the differences were not significant.
All children with SLI produced significantly more world knowledge and irrelevant answers on both the verbal task and storybook task compared with TD age-matched and younger children.
Irrelevant answers reduced as age increased, more so for TD children than children with SLI.
Children in the SLI+PLD produced more total errors in all categories on both tasks than children in the SLI-PLD group.
On the verbal task, children with SLI+PLD produced their most errors in the irrelevant category and second most errors in the knowledge category. They produce fewer total errors on the storybook task compared with the verbal task, and on the storybook task, their most frequent errors were in the knowledge category and their second most frequent errors were in the irrelevant category.
Compared with the children in the SLI+PLD group, on the verbal task, children with SLI-PLD produced their most errors in the knowledge category and second most frequent errors in the irrelevant category. In the storybook task, they produced the most errors in the irrelevant category and second most number of errors in the knowledge category.
The error pattern of children in the SLI-PLD was similar to the performance of younger TD children, although the SLI-PLD children made more total errors than the younger TD children. The error pattern of SLI+PDL differed from the younger TD children because of the greater incidence of irrelevant answers.
Discussion
The younger children and the children with SLI tended to rely on world knowledge when answering questions. They appeared to be considering the first relevant interpretation that came to mind, without considering or integrating the given contextual information to reach a conclusion/answer. These findings suggest that in answering pragmatically demanding questions, children use their world knowledge or experience, either inferring and enriching the semantic meaning of a word in the question or recalling something they have knowledge of on the basis of semantic meaning, which is familiar to the scenario or question being asked. Irrelevant answers reflected an inability to integrate relevant contextual information.
The incorrect answer strategies of children with SLI-PLD reflected more specific difficulties in using relevant context compared with children with SLI-PLD. The most significant difference was the increased number of irrelevant answers of the children with SLI+PLD compared with the typically developing children without pragmatic difficulties (NPLD) group. This finding on the Verbal task suggests that where these children have no other contextual cues except verbal information, this increased the level of difficulty. In the story task, irrelevant answers were not so increased and the children relied more on their world knowledge (and to a much lesser extent story context) as was the pattern with typically developing children. The pattern for all groups showed that in the verbal task, the scenario information was not evident in their incorrect answers. This may be because the scenarios were short—only two sentences—and each scenario was not related to the next. Hence, there may not have been sufficient information, particularly for the younger children to generate the context of the scenario. In the story context, pictures, previously generated inferences, and literal interpretation provided knowledge which could sometimes be used in interpretation. The comparatively better performance of children with PLD on the story task suggests impairment is greater when there is little additional context.
The authors suggest clinical implications for their findings. For example, when considering appropriate therapy, additional contextual support will make the task of interpretation more achievable where meanings must be inferred. They recommend providing increased contextual support such as pictures or storybooks with pictures and conversational exchanges about the character’s perspective or questions targeting the character’s point of view. They also suggest it is important to draw the attention of the child with SLI or PLD to the relevant context to make them aware of the alternatives in interpretation and to discourage stopping at the first interpretation (or relying on a key word as is often reported in responses of children with SLI).
The differences in the clinical group highlight the importance of assessing pragmatic language understanding alongside structural language assessments (i.e., grammar, vocabulary, or semantic knowledge). One way to address the difficulties of children with SLI+PLD in the clinical setting would be to encourage repetition and understanding of how the context is relevant to the interpretation. Within this framework, it is possible for clinicians to explore the difficulties with pragmatic language interpretation of language impaired children and to consider what kinds of contributions may be most facilitative (i.e., role play to increase different language experiences). Overall, the study suggests that children gradually develop the ability to integrate given information and to use relevant context and that verbal information without supporting referents/context increases the pragmatic load.