engleski

Processing pragmatic information in children with language impairment

While reading a competent reader builds up not only the literal meaning of the sentence, but also makes assumptions about the relevant context. Recent studies in experimental pragmatics show that the processes involved in building up these assumptions are not sequential, but parallel, i.e. that the contextual information is integrated at the same time as the literal meaning is constructed on-line. To check these findings (that are based on the population of non-impaired adults) a self-paced reading task was given to the participants divided in two groups: children with developmental language impairment (LI group) and typically developing controls (TD group). The participants had to read two sentences: the first defining the context, and the second that either required an additional assumption (the “bridging sentence”) or not. While the TD group clearly shows the delay in the self-paced reading at the beginning of the second sentence, the LI group show no such delay indicating the absence of the processes related to the “bridging sentence” assumption.

self-paced reading ; dyslexia ; binding sentences ; pragmatics

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