PMID- 37934774
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20231109
LR  - 20231110
IS  - 1932-6203 (Electronic)
IS  - 1932-6203 (Linking)
VI  - 18
IP  - 11
DP  - 2023
TI  - Relative clause comprehension in Cantonese-speaking children with and without 
      developmental language disorder.
PG  - e0288021
LID - 10.1371/journal.pone.0288021 [doi]
LID - e0288021
AB  - Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), present in 2 out of every 30 children, 
      affects primarily oral language abilities and development in the absence of 
      associated biomedical conditions. We report the first experimental study that 
      examines relative clause (RC) comprehension accuracy and processing (via looking 
      preference) in Cantonese-speaking children with and without DLD, testing the 
      predictions from competing domain-specific versus domain-general theoretical 
      accounts. We compared children with DLD (N = 22) with their age-matched 
      typically-developing (TD) children (AM-TD, N = 23) aged 6;6-9;7 and 
      language-matched (and younger) TD children (YTD, N = 21) aged 4;7-7;6, using a 
      referent selection task. Within-subject factors were: RC type (subject-RCs (SRCs) 
      versus object-RCs (ORCs); relativizer (classifier (CL) versus relative marker ge3 
      RCs). Accuracy measures and looking preference to the target were analyzed using 
      generalized linear mixed effects models. Results indicated Cantonese children 
      with DLD scored significantly lower than their AM-TD peers in accuracy and 
      processed RCs significantly slower than AM-TDs, but did not differ from the YTDs 
      on either measure. Overall, while the results revealed evidence of a SRC 
      advantage in the accuracy data, there was no indication of additional difficulty 
      associated with ORCs in the eye-tracking data. All children showed a processing 
      advantage for the frequent CL relativizer over the less frequent ge3 relativizer. 
      These findings pose challenges to domain-specific representational deficit 
      accounts of DLD, which primarily explain the disorder as a syntactic deficit, and 
      are better explained by domain-general accounts that explain acquisition and 
      processing as emergent properties of multiple converging linguistic and 
      non-linguistic processes.
CI  - Copyright: (c) 2023 Lai et al. This is an open access article distributed under the 
      terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted 
      use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author 
      and source are credited.
FAU - Lai, Jane
AU  - Lai J
AUID- ORCID: 0000-0003-4863-1832
AD  - Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic 
      University, Hong Kong, China.
AD  - Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, The Hong Kong 
      Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.
FAU - Chan, Angel
AU  - Chan A
AUID- ORCID: 0000-0002-9547-0210
AD  - Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic 
      University, Hong Kong, China.
AD  - Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, The Hong Kong 
      Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.
AD  - Peking University Research Centre on Chinese Linguistics, The Hong Kong 
      Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.
FAU - Kidd, Evan
AU  - Kidd E
AD  - Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
AD  - The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
AD  - ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Canberra, Australia.
LA  - eng
PT  - Journal Article
PT  - Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
DEP - 20231107
PL  - United States
TA  - PLoS One
JT  - PloS one
JID - 101285081
SB  - IM
MH  - Humans
MH  - Child
MH  - *Comprehension
MH  - Language
MH  - Linguistics
MH  - Cognition
MH  - *Language Development Disorders
PMC - PMC10629646
COIS- The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
EDAT- 2023/11/07 18:42
MHDA- 2023/11/09 06:41
PMCR- 2023/11/07
CRDT- 2023/11/07 13:35
PHST- 2022/10/25 00:00 [received]
PHST- 2023/06/19 00:00 [accepted]
PHST- 2023/11/09 06:41 [medline]
PHST- 2023/11/07 18:42 [pubmed]
PHST- 2023/11/07 13:35 [entrez]
PHST- 2023/11/07 00:00 [pmc-release]
AID - PONE-D-22-29398 [pii]
AID - 10.1371/journal.pone.0288021 [doi]
PST - epublish
SO  - PLoS One. 2023 Nov 7;18(11):e0288021. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0288021. 
      eCollection 2023.