Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, December 2014; 28(12): 895–911 ß 2014 Informa UK Ltd. ISSN: 0269-9206 print / 1464-5076 online DOI: 10.3109/02699206.2014.923940

Non-word repetition: The relationship between weak syllables and the omission of grammatical morphemes in children with specific language impairment

MARCO DISPALDRO Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Universita` degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy (Received 25 September 2013; revised 8 May 2014; accepted 8 May 2014)

Abstract Non-word (NW) repetition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a skill related to, but genetically separate from, grammatical ability. Prosodic structure of the syllables may bridge the gap between these two abilities. A NW repetition task was compared in a group of 15 preschool Italian children with SLI (ranged in age from 3;11 to 5;8) and 15 younger typically developing children (aged from 2;11 to 3;7) matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU). Grammatical ability was tested through a probe for direct-object clitic pronouns which is one of the most useful clinical markers in the Italian language. In NW repetition, children with SLI deleted more syllables than the TD-MLU children. The omission of weak syllables in a pre-stress position was a significant predictor of the omission of clitic pronouns. The present study shows that the link between grammar and NW is due to a prosodic characteristic that is more universally challenging in children with SLI.

Keywords: Direct-object clitic pronouns, Italian language, language disorders, phonological storage, prosody

Introduction Non-word repetition Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show a significant language disability, yet score within average levels on non-verbal intelligence tests. They exhibit normal hearing and show no evidence of frank neurological impairment (Leonard, 1998). One especially revealing task used in SLI research is the non-word (NW) repetition task. In the NW task, children hear a non-sense word and repeat it immediately. The typical pattern is that children with SLI may lag behind same-age peers in the repetition of one- and two-syllable NWs, but the gap between these groups becomes much larger when the NWs are three and four syllables in length (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990). It has been shown that when NWs are controlled for

Correspondence: Marco Dispaldro, Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Universita` degli Studi di Padova, Via Venezia, 8, Padova 35131, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]

896 M. Dispaldro neighbourhood density (Metsala & Chisholm, 2010) and phonotactic frequency (Edwards, Beckman, & Munson, 2004), it is the phonological short-term memory (PSTM) ability that is primarily involved in NW repetition (Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, & Baddeley, 1994). Twin studies of English-speaking children have indicated that weaknesses in NW repetition constitute a culturally unbiased endophenotype of a heritable form of language impairment; for example, in the Bishop, North, and Donlan (1996) and Bishop, Adams, and Norbury’s investigations (2006), monozygotic twins were found to be more concordant in their NW repetition weaknesses than were dizygotic twins. Relationship between NW repetition and grammatical abilities Several studies report a correlation between NW repetition and grammar in children with SLI, including measurement of verb agreement and tense marking use (Bishop et al., 2006; Botting & Conti-Ramsden, 2001; Conti-Ramsden, Botting, & Faragher, 2001), expressive and receptive syntactic skills (Sahle´n, Reuterskiold-Wagner, Nettelbladt, & Radeborg, 1999a, 1999b) and sentence comprehension (Montgomery, 1995; Montgomery & Evans, 2009; Norbury, Bishop, & Briscoe, 2002; Robertson & Joanisse, 2010). These studies seem to confirm the hypothesis according to which the link between these two types of weaknesses is the PSTM (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990): if a deficit in PSTM ability is present, children with SLI may store fewer items than children with typical development; as a consequence, the limited PSTM capacity could have an impact on grammar acquisition. A genetic twin study demonstrated that NW repetition and grammar ability in children with SLI are genetically separable (Bishop et al., 2006). This important result raised the question of why NW repetition is connected to grammatical ability in children with SLI. A hypothesis arises if we consider what exactly the NW repetition is measuring. NW repetition is a complex task that involves several cognitive processes, any of which could cause difficulties with the task. Despite the fact that phonological storage plays the main role in this task, other abilities might also affect performance: for example, some researchers assert that poor NW performance in children with SLI may be due to a basic phonological processing limitation (Bowey, 2006; Edwards & Lahey, 1998; Snowling, Chiat, & Hulme, 1991; van der Lely & Howard, 1993), such as the words’ metrical structure at the syllable level (Gallon, Harris, & van der Lely, 2007). Words are formed by a different number of syllables; syllables can be stressed (S) or weak (W). The basic unit of metrical organization is a stress foot composed of an S syllable plus an adjacent W syllable (SW). When young children begin to produce polysyllabic words they show a bias with respect to the SW pattern (Demuth, 1996). Words formed by two or more syllables that do not fit into this pattern are modified by young children to better resemble the SW sequence. Weak syllables which appear in a position that does not permit lengthening (pre-stress position, WS) are more vulnerable to being omitted or not processed (Gerken, 1996) with respect to W syllables that benefit from lengthening (post-stress position, SW). For example, most of the Italian words show a dominant penultimate stress pattern (e.g. SW, WSW and WWSW): in the word ‘‘giRAffa’’ (giRAffe) the first syllable (gi) is a weak syllable in a pre-stress position whereas the last two syllables (RAffa) form a SW foot; therefore, ‘‘giRAffa’’ (WSW) is more likely to be produced as ‘‘RAffa’’ rather than ‘‘giRA’’. The fact that prosodic cues are important in morpho-syntax was discovered also in children with language disability; McGregor and Leonard (1994), Bortolini and Leonard (1996), Leonard, Eyer, Bedore, and Grela (1997), and Leonard and Bortolini (1998) predicted that the omission of function words by children with SLI would be influenced by phonological factors: a grammatical category is easier in a language where it is (i) an S syllable or (ii) a W syllable in a post-stress position [SW], than in a language where it is (iii) a W syllable in a pre-stress position [WS].

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897

This is because, in the case of W syllables in a pre-stress position, the short duration assumes a crucial role during sentence processing: W syllables must be processed quickly because there is very little time before new information will appear in the speech stream (Leonard et al., 1997). These findings led Leonard (1998) to propose his Surface Account, which attributes problems with grammatical morphemes to their phonetic properties, in particular their relatively short duration. Children with SLI seem to be able to recognize unstressed syllables; however, when unstressed syllables play a role in a morphological rule, the likelihood that they will be processed adequately is reduced. The W syllable in a pre-stress position (WS) is the precise context in which clitic pronouns appear in Italian: direct-object clitic pronouns are weak monosyllables that usually precede a finite verb (e.g. lo BEve [WSW] ‘‘he/she drinks it’’) (in Italian the subject is not mandatory); furthermore, when a subject precedes the clitic + finite verb sequence, the resulting utterance requires the clitic to be preceded by another weak syllable (as in LUca lo BEve [SWWSW] ‘‘Luca drinks it’’), due to the fact that most words in Italian end in a weak syllable. Italian children with SLI often produce ‘‘LUca la MANgia’’ (Luca eats it) as ‘‘LUca MANgia’’ (Luca eats), omitting the pronoun (Bortolini, Caselli, Deevy, & Leonard, 2002; Bortolini et al., 2006). However, it is important to stress how other factors beyond prosody are likely to influence the presence or absence of morphemes in a sentence. For example, recently Leonard and Dispaldro (2013) showed how sentence production demands influence the degree to which clitic pronouns are present or not in a sentence (for English language, see Leonard et al., 2000, 2002). Moreover, although in the Italian language children with SLI omitted definite articles (Bottari, Cipriani, Chilosi, & Pfanner, 1998) because of prosodic constraint (e.g. mangia la torta [SW W SW], ‘‘s/he eats the cake’’ vs. fa la torta [S W SW] ‘‘s/he does the cake’’) (Crisma & Tomasutti, 2000), Caprin and Guasti (2009) have shown that position in the utterance also plays a role in syllable deletion: omission was higher when articles were in a subject position of verbal utterances or in front of nouns uttered in isolation than in an object position of verbal utterances, independently of the syllabic structure of the verbs. Finally, based on the theoretical framework of Wexler (1998, 2003), research in other languages such as Catalan (Gavarro`, Torrens, & Wexler, 2010) and French (Jakubowicz, Lea, Catherine, & Christophe-Loic, 1998) has shown how the prosodic feature of a syllable is not sufficient to determine the omission of the morpheme. Aims of the study In a recent study, Dispaldro, Deevy, and Leonard (2013a) have shown that the repetition of NWs is predictive of grammatical ability of children with SLI. In particular, a relationship was found between NW repetition and the production of direct-object clitic pronouns in preschool children with SLI. This work, however, did not analyze the reason for this relationship. The hypothesis of the present study is that NW repetition is a predictor of clitic pronouns omission because NWs are able to capture the phonological/prosodic obstacles present in the particular morpheme. Bortolini and Leonard (2000), correlating the initial weak-syllable deletion (using a word completion procedure) in the use of grammatical morphemes in Italian children with SLI, found a significant negative relationship between the deletion of weak syllables in a prestress position and the correct use of definite articles (in the Italian language definite articles assume the form of a single weak syllable). However, to our knowledge no studies have yet directly investigated the relationship between the prosodic structure of NW (e.g. [WSW] goRElo) and the use of particular grammatical forms that must be expressed in a prosodically challenging contexts (e.g. the direct-object clitic pronoun [WSW] ‘‘lo MANgia’’, s/he eats it). It is important to stress that the present study does not investigate the impact of prosodic abilities on the acquisition of clitic pronouns. As a consequence, the results of this paper cannot explain the

898 M. Dispaldro acquisition of functional morphemes in preschool children and the role that prosody has on this process. On the contrary, the general aim of the present study is to understand whether the link between NW and clitic pronouns in Italian children with SLI is due to the prosodic abilities underlying both these two linguistic tasks. In summary, the aims of the present study are twofold: (1) The first aim is to investigate the effect of the prosodic pattern on syllable omission in a NW repetition task. Based on PSTM accounts (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990), we predict a difference in the percentage of syllables omitted in function of word length: given the few phonological storage demands at the two syllable level, children should have no difficulty in repeating them however, by three syllables, syllable omissions should begin to increase. However, syllable deletion is not uniformly expected when the number of syllables is held constant: based on the previous research (Chiat & Roy, 2007; Gallon et al., 2007; Sahle´n et al., 1999a), children should not have difficulty with stress syllables; on the contrary, weaksyllable deletion should be present in a pre-stress position (WS) but not in a post-stress position (SW). (2) The second aim is to examine whether there is a relationship between W syllable deletion in a pre-stress position (WS) in a NW repetition task and the omission of clitic pronouns (OCP) in the Italian language. Leonard and Bortolini (1998) found that a group of children with SLI omitted clitic pronouns more frequently than MLU-matched control children when the pronoun preceded a stress syllable (as in lo SPINge ‘‘s/he pushes it’’). When NW repetition is able to capture this prosodic obstacle then a relationship between the pre-stress W-syllable deletion and the omission of direct-object clitic pronoun should be present.

Method Participants Thirty monolingual Italian-speaking children ranging in age from 2;11 to 5;8 (years;months) participated in the study. Fifteen preschool-aged children (10 males and 5 females) formed the SLI group. They ranged in age from 3;11 to 5;8 (M ¼ 4;11). The criteria for inclusion in the SLI group were a qualification for language intervention services based on an evaluation done by Health Services language therapists in the Northeast of Italy. The clinicians judged the children eligible for services on the basis of clinical judgment and the results of one or more language tests used in Italy. Based on the diagnosis carried out by the therapists, all 15 children had been diagnosed as having SLI with an expressive (8 children) or receptive–expressive deficit (6 children) (see Appendix A for participant details). In addition, each child showed a non-verbal IQ score of above 85 on the Italian version of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence–III (Fancello & Cianchetti, 2008). All children with SLI passed a pure-tone hearing screening bilaterally (20 dB) at 500, 1000, 2000 and 4000 Hz. Moreover, mean lengths of utterance in words (MLUw) was evaluated through analysis of the children’s spontaneous language samples. The MLUw averaged 2.82 (SD ¼ 0.53; range ¼ 1.87–3.55). The remaining 15 children (6 males and 9 females) were younger typically developing children, ranging in age from 2;11 to 3;7 (M ¼ 3;3). These children were significantly younger than the children in the SLI group, t (28) ¼ 11.08, p50.001. They were recruited from nursery schools in Padua. Children were not included if they showed any language, articulatory, hearing,

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neurological or psychiatric deficit according to parent and teacher reports. All children passed a pure-tone hearing screening bilaterally (20 dB) at 500, 1000, 2000 and 4000 Hz. Each child in this group was matched to a child in the SLI group in MLU to within 0.2 words. Hereafter, these younger children are referred to as the TD-MLU children. MLUs for these children averaged 2.68 (SD ¼ 0.55, range ¼ 1.81–3.68). The MLU values in very similar between the two groups, t (28) ¼ 0.70, p ¼ 0.49. All research procedures were conducted according to the guidelines of the University of Padua for the protection of human participants. Parental consent was obtained for each child before inclusion in the study. Materials and procedures Two tasks were administered to all participants – one grammatical task and one repetition task. The tasks were completed by each child in random order. All children’s responses were recorded on a computer using a Sony ECM CZ-10 microphone and Audacity software. Responses were transcribed after the experimental session. Grammatical task The grammatical task tested the third person direct-object clitic pronoun (la mangia ‘‘she/he eats it’’) (Appendix B). The present task has already been used in previous studies (Dispaldro et al., 2013a, 2013b). The production of this morpheme sharply distinguishes children with SLI from their TD peers (Bortolini et al., 2006; Dispaldro, Messina, & Scali, 2013d). The direct-object clitic pronoun in Italian marks person (first, second and third), number (singular and plural), and grammatical gender (masculine and feminine). The third person directobject clitic pronouns assume two singular forms (masculine lo and feminine la) and two plural forms (masculine li and feminine le). The task consisted of 16 items; during each item, the child must produce a sentence using the appropriate clitic pronoun. There are four items for each pronoun. In order to elicit the third person direct-object clitic pronoun, a pair of coloured drawings depicting two successive actions was presented. The examiner described the first of the two drawings and prompted the child to complete the sentence by describing the second, as in (1). (1) (Experimenter points to the first drawing and then the second drawing) Experimenter: ‘‘La bambina lava i piatti e poi . . . . . . ‘‘The girl washes the dishes and then . . .’’ Child: Li asciuga ‘‘[She] dries them’’

The first drawing appeared on the left-hand side of the computer screen, while the second was on the right-hand side. The order of presentation of items was random. In order to familiarize the children with the task, three practice items were used. In the case in which children did not use the clitic pronoun, feedback was given; the examiner repeated the practice trials as many times as necessary to ensure that the child understood the task. In all trials, the clitic pronoun is a weak monosyllable that precedes a finite verb (lo MAngia [WSW] ‘‘he/she eats it’’; le MANgiano [WSWW] ‘‘they eat them’’). Repetition task The repetition task included a list of 24 NWs. This list was used in previous studies (Dispaldro, Benelli, Marcolini, & Stella, 2009; Dispaldro, Deevy, Altoe´, Benelli, & Leonard, 2011; Dispaldro et al., 2013a, 2013b).

900 M. Dispaldro NWs had primary stress on the penultimate syllable, the most frequent stress pattern in Italian (diRUsia). The items were from 2 to 4 syllables in length. The interaction between length and metrical structure gives rise to the following patterns (see Appendix C): (a) Two-syllable NWs are formed by a SW pattern (BOfo). (b) Three-syllable NW: the first syllable is a weak syllable in a pre-stress position ([WSW] virTOma); the latter two syllables form a SW combination. (c) Four-syllable NW: the first weak syllable is in a word-initial position and the second is in a pre-stress position ([WWSW] cataSEpo); the latter two syllables form a SW combination. Scoring Grammatical task For the direct-object clitic pronoun task, responses were scored as correct if the pronoun agreed in terms of gender and number with the direct-object (Experimenter: ‘‘La bambina raccoglie le mele e poi..’’ Child: ‘‘Le mangia’’ [Experimenter: ‘‘The girl picks the apples and then..’’ Child: ‘‘she eats them’’]). Error responses were separated into omissions (‘‘mangia’’ [she eats] instead of ‘‘le mangia’’ [she eats them]) or substitutions (‘‘la mangia’’ [she eats it] instead of ‘‘le mangia’’ [she eats them]). Given that the aim of the task is to elicit the production of the clitic pronoun, and not its related verb, children’s responses were considered correct even if they contained a different but semantically related verb (e.g. Experimenter: ‘‘The girl buys the ice cream and then. . .’’ Child: ‘‘She licks it’’, instead of ‘‘She eats it’’). Moreover, all productions were considered correct even if children produced a different verb inflection (e.g. Experimenter: ‘‘The girls buy the ice cream and then. . .’’ Child: ‘‘She eats it’’, instead of ‘‘They eat it’’). All productions which were semantically and/or logically distant from the sentence context (e.g. ‘‘la bambina compra il gelato e poi. . . c’e‘ il gelato’’, [the girl buys the ice cream and then. . . there is the ice cream], instead of ‘‘lo mangia’’, [she eats it]), incomplete (e.g. ‘‘la bambina compra il gelato e poi. . . gelato’’, [the girl buys the ice cream and then. . . ice cream], instead of ‘‘lo mangia’’, [she eats it]), or ambiguous because of confusion with the homophonic definite article (e.g. ‘‘la bambina compra il gelato e poi. . . la’’, [the girl buys the ice cream and then. . . the, article, or it, feminine singular pronoun], instead of ‘‘lo mangia’’, [she eats it]) were excluded from the analysis. In addition, the use of the direct-object noun phrase instead of the clitic pronoun was also excluded from the analyses (e.g. mangia le mele, ‘‘she eats the apples’’). Repetition tasks The children’s responses were transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet by a native speaker of Italian. Two types of analysis were performed: (1) The first is on the percentages of phonemes correctly repeated (PPCR); the production of a NW was considered correct if children produced the phonemes in the same order as the target with no omissions (e.g. ‘‘bof’’ instead of ‘‘bofo’’) or substitutions (e.g. ‘‘boto’’ instead of ‘‘bofo’’) (additions and distortions were allowed) (Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998). Children’s articulation ability was also taken into account (Chiat & Roy, 2007; Conti-Ramsden, 2003; Deevy, Wisman Weil, Leonard, & Goffman, 2010; Dispaldro et al., 2013b; Gray, 2003; Thal, Miller, Carlson, & Vega, 2005) by considering developmental errors as correct (e.g. /t/ instead of /ts/). When using a NW repetition task with preschool children some errors might reflect a child’s limitation in producing a phoneme correctly instead of a limitation in phonological storage (Deevy et al., 2010). This is especially true for speech delays in children (Shriberg & Kwiatkowski, 1994), which can co-occur with SLI (Shriberg, Tomblin,

Non-word repetition

(2) (3) (4) (5)

901

& McSweeney, 1999). Minimizing the impact of developmental phonological errors on scores allowed us to more accurately assess the contributions of phonological storage to repetition performance and, as a consequence, to reduce the impact that articulation disability could have on performance. As a result, we were able to be more confident that group differences were not driven by differences in articulation. Accordingly, we examined the responses of the children and scored as correct any substitution that reflected a developmental phonological error in Italian, following Bortolini (1995) (for more details regarding the use of the percentage of correct phonemes with allowances for developmental phonological errors, please see Dispaldro et al., 2013b for the Italian language and Deevy et al., 2010 for the English language). Other substitutions and omissions were scored as errors. The total number of phonemes repeated correctly was then divided by the total number of target phonemes to obtain a PPCR at each length (2PPCR, 3PPCR and 4PPCR). Responses were also scored for the percentage of syllable loss. Three criteria were used to consider a syllable as lost (Chiat & Roy, 2007): The syllable was completely omitted (‘‘MItto’’ instead of ‘‘molMItto’’). The vowel was omitted with/without adjacent consonants (‘‘lMItto’’ instead of ‘‘molMItto’’). Two syllables were merged, combining the consonant from one with the vowel from the other (‘‘DUsia’’ instead of ‘‘diRUsia’’). In this case, the vowel was considered the anchor to determine which syllable was lost.

The total number of syllables omitted was then divided by the total number of target syllables children attempted, to obtain a percentage of syllable omission. It is important to stress that the omission of a single phoneme (‘‘iRUsia’’ instead of ‘‘diRUsia’’) is different to the omission of a whole syllable (‘‘RUsia’’ instead of ‘‘diRUsia’’).

Results Grammatical task As reported in the ‘‘Method’’ section, the use of the direct-object noun phrase was excluded from the analyses; the production of direct-object NPs did not differ between groups, t (28) ¼ 1.63, p ¼ 0.115 (SLI: mean 11%, SD 17%; TD-MLU: mean 3%, SD 8%). No difference was found in the production of sentence semantically distant from the target, t (28) ¼ 1.46, p ¼ 0.157 (SLI: mean 23%, SD 20%; TD-MLU: mean 15%, SD 12%). With respect to accuracy (descriptive statistics are reported in Table 1), the difference between the SLI and TD-MLU groups is significant, t (28) ¼ 6.91, p50.001, d ¼ 1.87. As expected, children with SLI also showed higher OCP than younger children with typical development, t (28) ¼ 4.382, p50.001, d ¼ 1.14. Finally, the difference between the two groups was not significant in the case of substitution errors, t (28) ¼ 1.993, p ¼ 0.056, d ¼ 0.55.

Table 1. Mean percentages (standard deviations) for clitic pronouns. Groups

Correct

Substitution

Omission

SLI TD-MLU

31 (30) 87 (9)

22 (20) 10 (8)

47 (39) 3 (5)

902 M. Dispaldro Non-word repetition task Accuracy A mixed-design analysis of variance was carried out on the percentage of phonemes correctly repeated, with word length as within-subjects factors, and participant group as a between-subjects factor (the percentages are reported in Figure 1). The results showed a main effect for the participant groups, F(1, 28) ¼ 13.35, p ¼ 0.001, p2 ¼ 0.32, with higher scores earned by the TD-MLU group (90%) than by the SLI group (78%). Length showed a significant main effect, F(2, 56) ¼ 20.79, p50.001, p2 ¼ 0.43, with accuracy decreasing with increasing syllables. Importantly, we found an interaction between word length and group, F(2, 56) ¼ 3.18, p ¼ 0.049, p2 ¼ 0.10, such that the increase in the number of syllables hampered performance in the SLI group more than in the TD-MLU group. In fact, a comparison between groups (p50.01) revealed that the difference between the children with SLI and the TD-MLU children was greater for foursyllable NWs than for two- and three-syllable NWs. Figure 1 shows this result expressed by the effect size d Cohen’s. We assume that this larger difference occurred at the four-syllable level because, at this level, there are greater demands for phonological storage. For this reason, the percentage of phonemes correctly repeated at 4-syllables (4PPCR) could be a good measure for testing the capacity of phonological storage (Dispaldro et al., 2013a). Omission Table 2 shows the mean of syllables omitted according to length, syllable position and group (two-syllable NW omissions are not reported since no omission was observed). Omissions are presented as the raw number of target syllables children omitted, and their percentages. The omission of whole syllables was a rare process. Just 4% of syllables were omitted; this result is totally in line with previous works that controlled syllable deletion in NW repetition tasks (Chiat & Roy, 2007; Sahle´n et al., 1999a). At the two-syllable level no omission was present, both in children with SLI and TD-MLU children (two-syllables NW were excluded from the analysis). At the 3- and 4-syllable level, 6 and 15 children with SLI omitted at least 1 syllable, respectively; on the contrary, the number of TD children who omitted at least one syllable was 2 and 7, respectively. Visual inspection of Table 2 suggests that the prosodic structure had an impact on the rate of loss: children omitted weak syllables in a pre-stress position to a greater extent than those in 0.50

d. Cohen's

0.00

−0.50

−1.00

−0.74 −0.90 −1.20

−1.50 2 Syllables

3 Syllables

4 Syllables

Figure 1. NW repetition accuracy: effect size (d. Cohen) through the comparison between SLI and TD-MLU groups for each word length.

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Table 2. Distribution of syllable loss according to prosodic structure, length and group. 3 Syllables (pa NO co – WSW) Group SLI Raw scores Percentages TD-MLU Raw scores Percentages

W

S

W

Mean %

9 7.5

1 0.8

3 2.5

3.6

4 3.3

0 0

0 0

1.1

4 Syllables (ca ta SE po – WWSW) W

18 15 9 7.5

W

S

W

Mean %

34 28.3

1 0.8

2 1.7

11.5

6 5

2 1.7

3 2.5

4.2

a post-stress position. Compared with post-stress syllables, pre-stress syllables were about 4 times more likely to be omitted in 3-syllable NWs and about 7 times more likely to be omitted in 4-syllable NWs. Stressed syllables were preserved almost without exception in both groups. Given the floor effect present in these data, a non-parametric analysis was preferred. Wilcoxon’s test showed a significant length effect, with omission increasing in function of length from 3- to 4-syllables (2.35% vs. 7.85%), z ¼ 3.68, p50.001. Children with SLI omitted more syllables than TD-MLU children (7.55% vs. 2.65%), Mann–Whitney’s test U ¼ 41 z ¼ 3.01 p ¼ 0.003; in particular, no difference between groups was present at 3-syllables (3.6% vs. 1.1%) (U ¼ 82 z ¼ 1.69 p ¼ 0.109), whereas a significant difference was present at 4-syllables (11.5% vs. 4.2%) (U ¼ 41 z ¼ 3.01 p ¼ 0.002). To verify whether a specific syllable was responsible for the difference between groups at 4-syllables NWs, a Chi-square model was used: a comparison between the Standardized Residual and the z-scores showed that the omission of the second W syllable in a pre-stress position (OWS) (cataSEpo, WWSW) was the major contributor to this result, 2 (3, N ¼ 75) ¼ 8.250, p ¼ 0.034.

The relationship between the NW repetition and grammatical task On the basis of the results previously reported, in this section, the relationship between the OCP (SLI: 47%; TD-MLU 3%), the percentage of phonemes correctly repeated at 4-syllable NWs (4PPCR-SLI: 70%; TD-MLU 86%) and the omission of the second weak syllable in a pre-stress position (OWS-SLI: 28%; TD-MLU 5%) was performed. Correlation coefficients are shown in Table 3. Results showed a highly significant correlation between the OWS (cataSEpo, WWSW) and the OCP (la MANgia, WSW [s/he eats it]). Figure 2 shows this relationship in both groups: the larger the omission of weak syllables in a pre-stress position the higher the OCP. Moreover, a correlation between the 4PPCR and the OCP was also found in children with SLI but not in TD-MLU children (Figure 3). On the basis of these results a series of regression analyses were planned with the aim of exploring, in a more stringent way, the relationship between 4PPCR and OWS to the OCP. Two fixed-order entry multiple regression analysis was performed. For each regression, the outcome variable was the OCP, the first predictor was Age (Step 1) and the second predictor was Group (Step 2). In both regressions Age significantly explained 20% of the variance, and Group the 29% beyond that explained by Age (Table 4). The first regression analysis was run to identify the contribution of 4PPCR relative to OWS in predicting the OCP. In this regression, 4PPCR was entered as Step 3 and the OWS variable was entered in Step 4; finally, a Group  4PPCR interaction was entered as Step 5. A significant increase in R2-change produced by the interaction term entered in Step 5 indicates that the group

904 M. Dispaldro Table 3. Correlation coefficients between the percentages of phonemes correctly repeated at 4-syllable NWs (4PPCR). SLI (n ¼ 15) TD-MLU (n ¼ 15) OCP 4PPCR OWS

OCP

4PPCR

OWS

_ 0.329 0.566*

0.610* _ 0.462

0.765** 0.514* _

Note: The percentages of omission of the second weak syllable in a pre-stress position at 4-syllable NWs (OWS) and the percentages of OCP in children with SLI (shaded) and typical development children (unshaded). *p50.05. **p50.01. OCP, Percentages of omission of clitic pronouns; 4PPCR, Percentages of phonemes correctly repeated at 4-syllable NWs; OWS, Percentages of omission of the second weak syllable in a pre-stress position at 4-syllable NWs.

Figure 2. Scatter plot showing the relationship between the percentages of OCP and the percentages omission of the second weak syllable in a pre-stress position at 4-syllable NWs (OWS).

variable influences the association between the 4PPCR and the dependent variable. The 4PPCR significantly explained 11% of the variance beyond that explained by Age and Group (Step 3). Importantly, the OWS significantly explained 14% of the variance beyond that explained by the three previous predictors (Step 4). Finally, on the contrary to the correlation analysis (Figure 3), no significant difference between groups was found with respect to the 4PPCR (Step 5). A second regression analysis was run to identify the contribution of OWS relative to 4PPCR in predicting the OCP. In this regression, OWS was entered as Step 3, 4PPCR as Step 4 and Group  OWS interaction as Step 5. The results showed that OWS significantly explained the 24%

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905

Figure 3. Scatter plot showing the relationship between the percentages of OCP and percentages of phonemes correctly repeated at 4-syllable NWs (4PPCR). Table 4. Multiple regression analysis on clitic pronoun omission. Regression 1 2

Regression 2 2

Step

Predictor

R change



t

p

Predictor

R change



t

p

1 2 3 4 5

AGE GROUP 4PPCR OWS GROUP *4PPCR

0.201 0.293 0.116 0.145 0.016

0.448 1.255 0.426 0.658 0.511

2.654 3.952 2.787 3.853 1.307

0.013 0.001 0.010 0.001 0.203

AGE GROUP OWS 4PPCR GROUP *OWS

0.201 0.293 0.246 0.016 0.001

0.448 1.255 0.759 0.177 0.031

2.654 3.952 4.954 1.273 0.240

0.013 0.001 50.001 0.215 0.813

OWS, Percentages of omission of the second weak syllable in a pre-stress position at 4-syllable NWs; 4PPCR, Percentages of phonemes correctly repeated at 4-syllable NWs.

of the variance beyond that explained by Age and Group (Step 3), but 4PPCR did not add any significant variance (Step 4). Finally, no significant interaction between Group and OWS was found (Step 5).

Discussion Several studies have reported a link between NW repetition and grammar (Botting & Conti-Ramsden, 2001; Conti-Ramsden et al., 2001; Montgomery, 1995; Montgomery & Evans, 2009; Sahle´n et al., 1999a, 1999b). In the case of Italian language, Dispaldro et al. (2013a) have reported a significant correlation between NWs and the ability to produce clitic pronouns.

906 M. Dispaldro Clitic pronouns represent a prosodic challenge for children with SLI (Leonard & Bortolini, 1998) as they are weak monosyllables set in a WS sequence (il bamBIno la MANgia [the boy eats it]). The aim of the present paper was to study the relationship between NWs repetition and the OCP in children with SLI. The rationale behind this project was that the metrical structure of the NWs could be the bridge that links these two abilities. Before discussing the main results, two observations are made that are believed to support the generalizability of the findings reported here: (1) First, as seen in a previous study on the Italian language (Bortolini et al., 2006), children with SLI were significantly impaired in their use of clitic pronouns compared with a younger group of TD children matched for MLU. In fact, children with SLI omitted clitic pronouns to a greater extent than typically developing children that are acquiring language (d ¼ 1.14). Such a finding confirms that this particular grammatical morpheme is very difficult for children with SLI and cannot be attributed to limitations they have in utterance length. (2) The present study showed that children with SLI were more adversely affected than the control group in NW repetition when the number of syllables to be repeated increased in length; this result is in line with the extensive SLI literature (Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990). As noted by others (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990), limitations in phonological storage might have been responsible for this result; in fact, the maximum difference between SLI and TD-MLU groups was present at a 4-syllable-length (d ¼ 1.20). The present study also confirmed a relationship between the NW repetition accuracy and the use of clitic pronouns in children with SLI (Dispaldro et al., 2013a), but not in younger children with typical development (Dispaldro et al., 2009, 2011): for children with SLI, the lower the accuracy on the repetition task, the higher the omission of pronouns. For a long period of time, this parallelism was interpreted as the result of a deficit in phonological storage (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990): children with SLI showed an impaired grammatical profile because their phonological storage plays a central role in how they learn and use grammatical information. In NW repetition, the loss of whole syllables is a rare process (Chiat & Roy, 2007; Sahle´n et al., 1999a) however, as the present study showed, not all syllables had the same opportunity to be deleted: children tend to omit syllables in relation to the length of the target and the prosodic structure of the syllable. With respect to length, syllables were significantly lost more in foursyllable NWs than in three- and two-syllable targets; certainly this means that a role of the phonological storage is present. However, when the length effects was held as a constant, strong syllable and weak syllables in a post-stress position were preserved, whereas weak syllables in a pre-stress position were significantly more vulnerable to being omitted. In particular, children with SLI tend to omit the second weak syllable in a pre-stress position (daveRUma, WWSW) to a greater extent than TD children. When the omission of weak syllables in a pre-stress position was used as a measure to control the role that phonological storage has in grammar ability, children with SLI and children with TD did not show a difference. On the contrary, a strong relationship was found between the omission of weak syllables and the OCP: in the regression analysis the omission of weak syllables in a pre-stress position explained additional variance beyond that explained by the phonological storage, whereas the contrary did not happen. In summary, although phonological storage is likely to affect repetition accuracy, it cannot fully account for the relationship between NWs and grammatical ability (van der Lely & Howard, 1993). On the contrary, the results that are shown seem to confirm that phonological processing could fill the gap between NW and grammar. NWs repetition requires both processing and storage of the stimulus; while storage allows retention of the stimuli for a brief amount of time, processing involves the analysis of the

Non-word repetition

907

phonological form of the target at different levels, such as the phonotactic frequency, neighborhood density and prosody (for a review see Gathercole, 2006). In this way, while processing is quite different to storage, a linear dependence does link these two abilities: thanks to processing, the phonological representation of the target can be stored, maintained, and retrieved from the phonological storage (Bowey, 2006). Phonological processing is thought to be, by some researchers, one of the causes of morphosyntactic impairment in SLI. For example, Joanisse and Seidenberg (1998, 2003) proposed that deficits in SLI are caused by a speech perception deficit that affects the development of phonological representations, which in turn has a detrimental impact on the capacity to maintain sentences in memory. In the same way, Chiat (2001) declared that impaired grammar is the consequence of a chain of events, which starts with a specific deficit in phonological processing that, disrupts the mapping processes through which grammar is acquired. Findings from other studies also indicate that phonological storage deficits alone do not cause substantial impairments of grammar. Montgomery (1995), for example, found a positive correlation between NW repetition performance and accuracy in comprehending sentences varying in length in children with SLI. This relationship held presumably because there is more verbal material to store when processing longer sentences. However, when sentences were manipulated for complexity (but not length), the relationship to phonological storage was not found (Montgomery & Evans, 2009). Robertson and Joanisse (2010) also suggested that comprehension of complex sentences requires processing beyond the simple storage of phonological material. The authors concluded that the core of the impairment in SLI incorporates storage and processing, rather than being localized to storage only. Grammar and NW repetition seem to be two genetically separate abilities (Bishop et al., 2006) which may both be present in a SLI profile. In the case of the third person of the direct-object clitic pronoun in the Italian language, the present study has shown that the bridge between these two clinical markers (Bortolini et al., 2006; Dispaldro et al., 2013b) is the interaction between grammatical deficit and the prosodic characteristic which is more universally challenging in children with SLI. However, further studies are needed to extend this finding to other languages and other morphemes. In conclusion, a simply phonological storage approach (in terms of quantity) should be viewed with caution when explaining the interaction between NW and grammar. Providing a measure of the metrical structure of the NW (in terms of quality) allows considering the complexity of the process in a more stringent way. We believe that the problem is not only how many items children can store in memory but also the manner of accessing the items. Given the brief temporal nature of the unstressed syllables, a sluggishness in the process could have a detrimental impact when these syllables assume a morphological rule (Dispaldro et al., 2013c). From this perspective, it is the combination of both slowness in processing and phonological storage deficit that underlies the poor performance of the SLI groups. The present study seems to show that NW repetition is a task able to capture this challenge. Acknowledgements We are grateful to the children who participated in the study and their parents who gave their consent. Finally, we thank the schools and the National Health Services for their cooperation. Declaration of interest This work was supported by a grant from the Universita` di Padova (Assegno di Ricerca Senior 2011). The author report no conflicts of interest.

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Edwards, J., & Lahey, M. (1998). Nonword repetitions in children with specific language impairment: Exploration of some explanations for their inaccuracies. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19, 279–309. Edwards, J., Beckman, M. E., & Munson, B. (2004). The interaction between vocabulary size and phonotactic probability effects on children’s production accuracy and fluency in non-word repetition. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47, 421–436. Fancello, G., & Cianchetti, C. (2008). Wechsler preschool and primary scale of intelligence – III. Firenze: O.S. Gallon, N., Harris, J., & van der Lely, H. K. J. (2007). Non-word repetition: An investigation of phonological complexity in children with grammatical SLI. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 21, 435–455. Gathercole, S. E. (2006). Non-word repetition and word learning: The nature of the relationship. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 513–544. Gathercole, S. E., & Baddeley, A. D. (1990). 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910 M. Dispaldro Shriberg, L., & Kwiatkowski, J. (1994). Developmental phonological disorders I: A clinical profile. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 37, 1100–1126. Shriberg, L., Tomblin, B., & McSweeney, J. (1999). Prevalence of speech delay in 6-year-old children and comorbidity with language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 42, 1461–1481. Snowling, M., Chiat, S., & Hulme, C. (1991). Words, nonwords, and phonological processes: Some comments on Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, and Baddeley. Applied Psycholinguistics, 12, 369–373. Thal, D., Miller, S., Carlson, J., & Vega, M. (2005). Nonword repetition and language development in 4-year-old children with and without a history of early language delay. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48, 1481–1495. van der Lely, H. K. J., & Howard, D. (1993). Children with specific language impairment: Linguistic impairment or short term memory deficit? Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 36, 1193–1207 Wexler, K. (1998). Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint: A new explanation of the optional infinitive stage. Lingua, 106, 23–79. Wexler, K. (2003). Lenneberg’s dream: Learning, normal language development, and specific language impairment. In Y. Levy & J. Schaeffer (Eds.), Language competence across populations: Toward a definition of specific language impairment (pp. 12–62). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Appendix A

Expressive and receptive language of participants with SLI: summary scores. Production

a

4;6 5;1 4;10 3;11 5;4 5;5 4;4 5;0 5;4 5;3 5;8 4;3 5;8 4;8 4;5

Age 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 a

Comprehension Lexicon

PIQ

Lexicon TVLc

Grammar EMd

MLUw

115 85 96 109 100 106 96 91 100 98 85 105 85 85 85

50 1 5 5 25 1 35 1 25 1 1 25 25 1 5

H H M H M M M H M H M H H H H

1.74 2.63 3.39 2.41 3.62 2.74 2.86 1.88 3.62 3.50 2.86 3.26 3.31 2.28 2.97

b

e

f

PPVT

Grammar g

TVL

TCGBh

95 25

75 75 25 25 25 50 25 10 25 10 25

84 80 25 104 25 70 25 25 72 83

PVCLi

HM 45 1 35

50 G LM

AGE is expressed in years;months. PIQ (Performance IQ, WPPSI-III) has a mean of 100 and a SD of 15. c TVL (Test di Valutazione del Linguaggio): expressive vocabulary is expressed in 11 centile points (1 , 5 , 15 , 25 , 35 , 45 , 55 , 65 , 75 , 85 , 95 ). d EM: Expressive Morphosyntax was evaluated by clinicians through spontaneous language samples as adequate (A), mildly inadequate (M) or highly inadequate (H). e PPVT: has a mean of 100 and a SD of 15. f MLUw is expressed in words. g TVL (Test di Valutazione del Linguaggio): receptive vocabulary is expressed in 11 centile points (1 , 5 , 15 , 25 , 35 , 45 , 55 , 65 , 75 , 85 , 95 ). h TCGB (Test di Comprensione Grammaticale per Bambini): results are expressed in 5 centile points (10 , 25 , 50 , 75 , 95 ). i PVCL (Prove di Valutazione della Comprensione Linguistica): results are expressed in 6 classes (I, insufficient; P, poor; LM, low middle; M, middle; HM, high middle; G, good; VG, very good). b

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Appendix B: Third person of direct-object clitic pronouns task La bambina vede la mucca e poi.. LA munge. ‘‘The girl sees the cow and then.. [She] milks it’’ Il bambino tira la corda e poi.. LA lega. ‘‘The boy stretches the rope and then.. [He] fastens it’’ Le bambine portano la bici e poi.. LA lavano. ‘‘The girls carry the bicycle and then.. [They] wash it’’ I bambini vedono la macchina e poi.. LA prendono. ‘‘The boys see the car and then.. [They] take it’’ La bambina raccoglie il fiore e poi.. LO annusa. ‘‘The girl picks the flower and then.. [She] smells it’’ Il bambino prende il libro e poi.. LO strappa. ‘‘The boy takes the book and then.. [He] tears the page from it’’ Le bambine vedono il coniglio e poi.. LO inseguono. ‘‘The girls see the rabbit and then.. [They] chase it’’ I bambini comprano il gelato e poi.. LO mangiano. ‘‘The boys buy the ice-cream and then.. [They] eat it’’ La bambina raccoglie le mele e poi.. LE mangia. ‘‘The girl picks the apples and then.. [She] eats them’’ Il bambino vede le farfalle e poi.. LE prende. ‘‘The boy sees the butterflies and then.. [He] takes them’’ Le bambine prendono le bambole e poi.. LE pettinano. ‘‘The girls take the dolls and then.. [They] comb them’’ I bambini cucinano le torte e poi.. LE mangiano. ‘‘The boys cook the cakes and then.. [They] eat them’’ La bambina prende i panini.. e poi LI mangia. ‘‘The girl takes the sandwiches and then.. [She] eats them’’ Il bambino vede i gatti e poi.. LI accarezza. ‘‘The boy sees the cats and then.. [He] pets them’’ Le bambine lavano i piatti.. e poi LI asciugano. ‘‘The girls wash the plates and then.. [They] wipe them.’’ I bambini portano i cani e poi.. LI lavano. ‘‘The boys take the dogs for a walk and then.. [They] wash them’’

Appendix C Appendix C Non-word repetition task. Syllable length 2 4 2 3 4 3 4 2 3 4 3 2 3 3 4 2 4 2 3 4 2 2 3 4

Orthographic transcription

IPA transcription

Word metrical structure

bofo catasepo noddie villopa soverloche tundalo mudegefio frive panoco daveruma dirusia simi gorelo molmitto muponzano cobe molataffo parna virtoma canfanola tammo kansa moruna binnutara

[’bo fo] [ka ta ’se po] [’no dje] [vi ’l:o pa] [so ver ’lo ke] [tun ’da lo] [mu de ’dZe fjo] [’fri ve] [pa ’no ko] [da ve ’ru ma] [di ’ru sja] [’si mi] [go ’re lo] [mol ’mi t:o] [mu pon ’za no] [’ko be] [mo la ’ta f:o] [’par na] [vir ’to ma] [kan fa ’no la] [’ta m:o] [’kan sa] [mo ’ru na] [bi n:u ’ta ra]

SW WWSW SW WSW WWSW WSW WWSW SW WSW WWSW WSW SW WSW WSW WWSW SW WWSW SW WSW WWSW SW SW WSW WWSW

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