Selective imitation of the passive construction through modeling

Six 4- to 5-yr-old subjects were exposed to five sessions in which an adult model used passive sentences to describe a set of modeling stimuli. Probe stimuli, which the subjects were asked to describe without benefit of modeling and without selective reinforcement were interspersed among modeling stimuli. A matched group of control subjects received probletrials but no modeling trials. Both groups of subjects were subsequently tested on their ability to comprehend active and passive sentence forms. Every subject in the experimental group produced passive sentences on probe trials even though there was considerable variability in the number of passives produced. No control subject produced passives. The modeling procedure increased the comprehension scores of the experimental group above those of the control group though the scores of both groups were above chance. The results were contrasted with earlier studies in which modeling was ineffective in producing passive usage and in which comprehension of the passive was not demonstrated by even older children.     

Comprehension,selective imitation,and the CIP hypothesis

The role of comprehension training in the selective imitation of indirect-direct object sentences was assessed for six preschool children. A modeling condition resulted in normal usage of indirect-direct object sentences for five of six subjects, but reversed usage was not obtained when modeling was reversed. Subsequent receptive comprehension training on normal and reversed forms of indirect-direct object sentences resulted in generalization to the productive mode. These results were related to an hypothesis about language acquisition in which selective imitation is a function of comprehension.     

Children's use ofGet passives

Children's use ofget in passivelike constructions was examined in this study. Fifty-eight children at three age levels were tested twice on imitation, comprehension, and production tasks. For the imitation and comprehension tasks, passive sentences withget were modeled in one instance and withbe in the other instance. On both tasks, children performed significantly better on theget items than on thebe items. For the production tasks, active sentences were used as the experimental stimuli. Among 928 production responses possible, children produced 423get passives and 6be passives. The frequency ofget passives increased with increasing age. Qualitative analyses were performed to determine agerelated changes in the pattern of linguistic strategies chosen. These data were consistent with predictions derived from a model of lexical directionality: Children used moreget thanbe passives and more truncated than full passives.     

Does immediate imitation influence long-term memory for observed actions?

Long-term memory for object-related information acquired observationally was studied among younger and older toddlers under two conditions of acquisition and retention: direct imitation followed by reproduction after a 10 min delay (delayed imitation), and deferred imitation. A principal aim was to determine whether direct imitation fosters a form of enactive representation that improves long-term memory, or whether such memory is influenced more by visual encoding factors. Tasks consisted of five simple action combinations or separations. Results indicated that post-test scores were higher under all three post-test conditions than under pretest. Likewise, post-test performance was higher than that of a comparison group that did not observe the target actions. The results overall indicate that direct imitation did not operate substantially to improve memory for the modelled acts. Children were able to encode and retain about as much from their visual pickup of the modeled acts as from feedback obtained through the process of imitation. This finding was especially true for the older children.     

Role of referent concreteness in the acquisition of passive sentence comprehension through abstract modeling

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that development of syntactic comprehension through verbal modeling is enhanced by referent concreteness as a contextual influence. Young children heard a model narrate a series of events in passive form while the model either performed the corresponding activities, showed pictures portraying the same activities, or displayed no referential aids. In accord with prediction, verbal modeling with enactive referents produced higher levels of comprehension of passives than modeling with pictorial referents or modeling without referential aids. Modeling with pictorial referents and modeling without referents did not differ in overall efficacy. However, modeling alone produced results that were less consistent across different measures of comprehension. Children who lacked understanding of passives were more dependent on concrete referents than those who had some initial comprehension of the linguistic form. The results suggest that verbal modeling with pictorial referents and verbal modeling alone facilitate comprehension of passives, whereas verbal modeling with enactive referents promotes learning. Findings of a supplemental experiment reveal that the effects of verbal modeling on comprehension are enhanced when syntactic forms occur in a meaningful verbal context.     

Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers

Questions concerning the role of input in the growth of syntactic skills have generated substantial debate within psychology and linguistics. The authors address these questions by investigating the effects of experimentally manipulated input on children's skill with the passive voice. The study involved 72 four-year-olds who listened to stories containing either a high proportion of passive voice sentences or a high proportion of active voice sentences. Following 10 story sessions, children's production and comprehension of passives were assessed. Intervention type affected performance--children who heard stories with passive sentences produced more passive constructions (and with fewer mistakes) and showed higher comprehension scores than children who heard stories with active sentences. Theoretical implications of these results for the understanding of the nature of syntactic skills and practical implications for the development of preschool materials are discussed.     

Imitation improves language comprehension

Humans imitate each other during social interaction. This imitative behavior streamlines social interaction and aids in learning to replicate actions. However, the effect of imitation on action comprehension is unclear. This study investigated whether vocal imitation of an unfamiliar accent improved spoken-language comprehension. Following a pretraining accent comprehension test, participants were assigned to one of six groups. The baseline group received no training, but participants in the other five groups listened to accented sentences, listened to and repeated accented sentences in their own accent, listened to and transcribed accented sentences, listened to and imitated accented sentences, or listened to and imitated accented sentences without being able to hear their own vocalizations. Posttraining measures showed that accent comprehension was most improved for participants who imitated the speaker's accent. These results show that imitation may aid in streamlining interaction by improving spoken-language comprehension under adverse listening conditions.     

The Effects of Phonological Short-Term Memory and Speech Perception on Spoken Sentence Comprehension in Children: Simulating Deficits in an Experimental Design

The roles of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and speech perception in spoken sentence comprehension were examined in an experimental design. Deficits in pSTM and speech perception were simulated through task demands while typically-developing children (N \(=\) 71) completed a sentence-picture matching task. Children performed the control, simulated pSTM deficit, simulated speech perception deficit, or simulated double deficit condition. On long sentences, the double deficit group had lower scores than the control and speech perception deficit groups, and the pSTM deficit group had lower scores than the control group and marginally lower scores than the speech perception deficit group. The pSTM and speech perception groups performed similarly to groups with real deficits in these areas, who completed the control condition. Overall, scores were lowest on noncanonical long sentences. Results show pSTM has a greater effect than speech perception on sentence comprehension, at least in the tasks employed here.     

Development of the use of word order in comprehension

Thirty-three children aged between 19 and 38 months were presented with six reversible active and six reversible passive sentences and were required to act them out. For each child, mean length of utterance was calculated from a sample of spontaneous speech. Mean length of utterance was a more consistent predictor of performance than chronological age. Seven children with a mean length of utterance between 1.0 and 1.5 morphemes per utterance were unable to use the word order information in either type of sentence for comprehension. More developed children could comprehend reversible active sentences but not reversible passives. Children with a mean length of utterance between 3.0 and 3.5 morphemes per utterance systematically reversed the meaning of the reversible passives. The results are discussed in relation to previous studies of word order comprehension and studies of word order in production.This research was supported in part by PHS grant HD-02908 from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. Roger Brown is the principal investigator.     

Role saliency cues and children's sentence comprehension

Forty-eight children at four age levels (3, 4, 5, and 7 years) acted out active and passive sentences immediately after exposure to matching information, mismatching information, and no-information cues. The matching information cues yielded the highest comprehension scores, followed in order by the no-information and the mismatching information cues. Active sentences were easier to comprehend than passive sentences, and comprehension scores improved with age. Processing context information in the form of role saliency cues is a component of children's language comprehension and development. It was found that context is used differentially depending on age and linguistic knowledge. The results indicated that the analysis of children's comprehension skills is a multifaceted process not solely dependent upon syntactic processing.This research is in part a revision of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio. A summarized version was presented at the Annual Convention of the American Speech and Hearing Association, San Francisco, 1978.     

Relative Clause Gap-Filling in Children with Specific Language Impairment

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have been observed to have production and perception difficulties with sentences containing long-distance dependencies, but it is unclear whether this is due to impairment in grammatical knowledge or in processing mechanisms. The current study addressed this issue by examining automatic on-line gap-filling in relative clauses, as well as off-line comprehension of the same stimulus sentences. As predicted by both knowledge impairment and processing impairment models, SLI children showed lack of immediate gap-filling after the relative clause verb, in comparison to a control group of typically developing children. However, on the off-line measure of comprehension of the same stimuli sentences, SLI children and TD children did not differ qualitatively. This finding is incompatible with knowledge impairment. We interpret the results to show that SLI children have impaired processing mechanisms (such as temporally delayed gap-filling) but are not impaired in their grammatical knowledge.     

Validation of the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale

Relationships between sociometric indices and scores of 160 elementary-school children on the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale (CABS) were examined to determine whether this instrument differentiates children of varying levels of social competence. Children who obtained either high or low scores on peer nominations of friendship and admiration were identified and compared on CABS passive, aggressive, and assertive scores. Children who scored high on positive peer nominations responded in a significantly less aggressive manner than children who received low scores on such nominations. These effects were observed for the CABS format that consisted of stimulus situations involving adults but not for the form involving peers. With regard to responses toward peers, a significant interaction between sex and sociometric status emerged. These findings suggest the importance of incorporating subject variables such as race and sex as well as assessments of behavior toward both adults and children in isolating and training components of social skill.The authors wish to express their appreciation to Jean Birbilis, Gail Hammersly, Marieta Knopf, and Donna Wadley for their assistance in data collection and analysis.     

Speech disfluencies in nonstutterers Syntactic complexity and production task effects

The differences in the number of disfluencies of 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old nonstuttering children were investigated as syntactic complexity was varied in three different syntactic constructions: 1) simple affirmative declarative with copula + ing (SAAD), 2) future (FUT), and 3) passive (PAS) within a sentence imitation and a sentence-modeling task. The subjects repeated 30 sentences from the imitation task stimuli and produced response constructions from 30 pictures from the modeling task stimuli. The 3-year-olds exhibited significantly more disfluencies than the 5-year-olds, and the 5-year-olds produced significantly more disfluencies than the 7-year-olds. All three age groups produced significantly more disfluencies on the modeling task than on the imitation task. A significant complexity effect was demonstrated for the PAS construction. Results are compared to previous research findings and discussed with reference to hypothesized linguistic complexity and task difficulty.     

Syntactic loss versus processing deficit: an assessment of two theories of agrammatism and syntactic comprehension deficits

This research evaluated Grodzinsky's (1984, 1986a) syntactic loss and Kolk and van Grunsven's (1985) working memory impairment explanations of syntactic comprehension deficits in agrammatic aphasics. Four aphasic patients were evaluated who showed different patterns of impairment on morphological and structural aspects of production. The comprehension tasks compared performance on full and truncated passive sentences. The syntactic loss hypothesis predicted worse performance on truncated than full passives, while the working memory deficit hypothesis predicted the reverse. Neither hypothesis was supported, as the patients performed at a similar level on both types of passives. In addition, there was little relation between the patients' production indices and their comprehension level. The results argue against any global theory of agrammatism that attempts to attribute all agrammatic speech and co-occurring syntactic comprehension deficits to the same source.     

Reception training effects on the production of modeled language constructions

Several previous studies have reported that first-grade-age children increase their usage of prepositional phrases when exposed to novel (inverted) prepositional constructions. The hypothesis was tested that such anomalous increases could be eliminated by discrimination training on the two prepositional forms. One group of first-grade subjects (age 72 months) was trained to respond differentially to sentences containing either familiar or novel prepositional constructions, while a control group received only exposure to the same sentences. As predicted, when later exposed to the modeling of novel constructions, children in the pretrained group did not increase their frequency of familiar prepositional phrases, while those in the control group did.     

Exposure and response prevention in the natural environment: A comparison with obsessive-compulsive patients

Thirteen obsessive-compulsive clients were treated with different methods of response prevention. Four experimental conditions were obtained through a 2 × 2 factorial design, in which the two main variables were varied: (1) gradual treatment vs flooding; and (2) modeling vs no-modeling. Clients were treated at their homes, three times weekly. Each session lasted 2 hr. Results at the post-test revealed, that modeling was superior to no-modeling (p < 0.05) on avoidance-other compulsions, therapist-rating only. On anxiety-main compulsions, clients rating the gradual method of treatment had been superior to flooding (p < 0.05). No other significant differences were found.     

Phonological short-term memory contributions to sentence processing in young children

Two experiments investigated the contribution of phonological short-term memory to the processing of spoken sentences by 4- and 5-year-old children. In Experiment 1, sentences contained either short or longer words, and varied in syntactic structure. Overall, repetition but not comprehension of the sentences was significantly influenced by word length. In Experiment 2. children selected on the basis of their high phonological short-term memory ability were founded to be superior at repeating sentences to children of lower phonological short-term memory ability, although the two groups did not differ in their comprehension accuracy for the same sentences. In both experiments, comprehension and repetition performance were differently influenced by particular sentence structures. It is proposed that sentence repetition in children is constrained by phonological memory capacity, and is therefore directly influenced by memory-related factors that include the length and number of words in sentences, and individual differences in memory skills.     

Oral and Hand Movement Speeds are Associated with Expressive Language Ability in Children with Speech Sound Disorder

This study tested the hypothesis that children with speech sound disorder have generalized slowed motor speeds. It evaluated associations among oral and hand motor speeds and measures of speech (articulation and phonology) and language (receptive vocabulary, sentence comprehension, sentence imitation), in 11 children with moderate to severe SSD and 11 controls. Syllable durations from a syllable repetition task served as an estimate of maximal oral movement speed. In two imitation tasks, nonwords and clapped rhythms, unstressed vowel durations and quarter-note clap intervals served as estimates of oral and hand movement speed, respectively. Syllable durations were significantly correlated with vowel durations and hand clap intervals. Sentence imitation was correlated with all three timed movement measures. Clustering on syllable repetition durations produced three clusters that also differed in sentence imitation scores. Results are consistent with limited movement speeds across motor systems and SSD subtypes defined by motor speeds as a corollary of expressive language abilities.     

Extralinguistic control of language comprehension and production in the nonfluent child

The study investigated (1) the developmental progression postulated to exist between comprehension and production of sentences having the same grammatical form, and (2) the effects of syntactic, semantic, and extralinguistic variables on comprehension and production in nursery-school children. Comprehension trials required choices among four puzzle piece alternatives for which (a) both subject and object pieces differed (Phase I) or (b) only grammatical subject pictures differed (Phase II). During production trials children were asked to label preconstructed puzzles. Results indicated the comprehension-production relationship to vary as a function of age, sentence prepositions, and phases. Differential effects of semantic and extralinguistic variables during comprehension were found primarily for the youngest children, suggesting that logical relations among agent-actor-object were not sole controllers of language comprehension. Nonsyntactic control of production responses was not found.     

Syntactic priming in 3- and 4-year-old children: evidence for abstract representations of transitive and dative forms

The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms (i.e., active/passive for transitive; double-object/prepositional for dative). Children were then asked to describe pictures identical to those shown in the corresponding baseline procedure. In both transitive and dative conditions, 4-year-old children were more likely to use a particular syntactic form if it had been used by the experimenter. Three-year-old children did not show priming effects, but their production of transitive sentences was higher following transitive primes than in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, an additional group of 3-year-olds participated in a procedure in which they repeated the experimenter's sentences before describing the pictures. This procedure yielded significant priming effects for transitive and dative forms. These results indicate that very young children possess abstract syntactic representations, but that their access to these representations is sensitive to task demands.