PROFESSORS JAMES MONTGOMERY, RONALD GILLAM & JULIA EVANS
Sentence struggles
Professors James Montgomery, Ronald Gillam and Julia Evans are working to better understand
sentence deficits in children. Here, they describe the different perspectives on specific language
impairment, and the value of tight-knit collaboration
Can you introduce the key aspects of your
research into sentence comprehension
deficits in children with SLI?
The biggest challenge we faced related to
sample sizes. Children with SLI represent about
7 per cent of the child population. Identifying
sufficient numbers of these children, along with
properly matched controls, was a challenge.
The project involves modelling the influence
of a variety of theoretically motivated and
We are in the midst of preliminary data
analysis. However, once final analyses are
complete, our knowledge will be deepened
in a number of areas, including, for example,
the nature of sentence comprehension in
SLI and the cognitive measures that are the
most robust discriminators of children with
SLI and typically developing children. Our
ultimate goal is to develop a theoretically- and
empirically-grounded clinical profile of SLI
and alternative interventions to remediate
comprehension deficits.
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The three of us collaborate 100 per cent. A huge
advantage of this approach is that all of us
As the first team to investigate the
relationship between children’s cognitive
limitations and sentence comprehension
deficits, did you experience any challenges?
How did you overcome them?
Where have you made progress towards a
better theoretical and clinical understanding
of SLI?
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On which topics do you collaborate? What are
the benefits of this?
The four studies correspond to the four different
sentence structures we are investigating. We
are modelling the comprehension of two simple
structures and two complex structures. The
key to understanding the sentences we have
designed is that children must primarily use
their grammatical knowledge. This approach
allows us to address our aims with specificity.
We selected simple and complex sentence
structures that differ in grammatical complexity
because children with SLI are less able to
comprehend complex structures. By modelling
these structures in the groups separately we
will understand the similarities/differences in
sentence comprehension within and between
the groups.
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Two different views exist about the nature of SLI
comprehension deficits. One is that deficits are
due to poor grammatical knowledge. The other
assumes various cognitive limitations are at the
root of their deficits. Our project aims to test
these theories. Large groups of children with
SLI and age-matched peers have completed
a battery of theoretically motivated cognitive
measures and a sentence comprehension
task involving four highly controlled sentence
structures. We will model the understanding
of each group to determine which cognitive
measures best explain comprehension. If we
discover various cognitive abilities account
for that understanding, that will support a
cognitive processing view of SLI sentence
comprehension.
You are conducting four integrated studies.
Can you explain the purpose of each arm of
the research?
empirically derived attention, memory and
perception variables on children’s sentence
comprehension accuracy and processing time.
This requires fairly large numbers of children.
Modelling of the SLI group also requires
propensity matching techniques to control for
the effects of selected demographic variables
like age, parent education, family income and
gender. However, we were able to meet the
challenge by all three research sites working
together very diligently. Our efforts have paid off
because our project includes one of the largest
and most diverse SLI samples in history.
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JM: My interest in children’s sentence
comprehension came about when I was
working clinically, prior to pursuing my
PhD. Many of the children I worked with had
sentence comprehension problems. As I
consulted my field’s literature (speech language
pathology) for information about the nature of
these problems and, more importantly, how
to treat them, I found very little information.
As a doctoral student I focused my studies on
children with specific language impairment
(SLI) and especially sentence comprehension
abilities. In general, children with SLI are
developing typically except for language.
share common knowledge about the cognitive
and comprehension deficits of children with SLI,
but we each bring our own unique knowledge
and set of methodological skills to the table. In
combination, our work has multiple important
theoretical and methodological benefits.
As a team, we are able to think broadly and
deeply about the issues. Any problem solving
that needs to be done is much easier with
three minds.
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When did you become interested in sentence
comprehension deficits?
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?
INTERNATIONAL INNOVATION
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Closing in on comprehension deficits
Taking a systematic and data-driven approach, researchers from Ohio University, Utah State
University and University of Texas-Dallas, are beginning to grasp the cognitive mechanisms
underlying specific language impairment, a childhood deficit that can affect development
THE SLI DICTIONARY
EVERY TIME YOU hear or read a sentence,
your brain processes each individual word
to make sense of it. Although we do this
every day without even realising it, sentence
comprehension is a complex process. It involves
the moment-by-moment integration of several
intermediate structures (phrases and clauses)
into a coherent sentence.
Despite the instinctive nature of the process,
sentence comprehension is not as easy for
some as it is for others. Some children develop
a language-based learning disability called
specific language impairment (SLI). Although
these children are typically developing well
in all other respects, they have significant
language impairments in terms of their ability
to construct sentences (expressive abilities) and
understand them (receptive abilities). Clearly,
SLI can hinder a child’s learning and disrupt
their academic achievement.
To combat this problem, a US team comprising
Professors James Montgomery, Ronald Gillam
and Julia Evans, are working to identify the
cognitive mechanisms that underlie sentence
comprehension difficulties in children with SLI.
In a study funded by the National Institute on
Deafness and Other Communication Disorders,
they will use statistical modelling techniques
to analyse sentence comprehension. Together,
they will assess both group and individual
comprehension using two forms of sentence:
basic, or canonical, and complex, or
non-canonical.
PROBLEMS PROCESSING
Children with SLI demonstrate language
deficits despite the absence of any
clear cause, such as hearing loss, brain
damage or psychosocial disorders. Clearly,
comprehension deficits are complex, and
much less is known about receptive problems
than those with expression difficulties.
However, recent evidence suggests that
the comprehension difficulties observed
in SLI may be the result of difficulties with
processing linguistic information.
Broadly speaking, there are two theories to
describe sentence comprehension deficits
in SLI: domain-specific accounts that
contextualise the deficit within the language
system, and domain-general accounts that view
sentence comprehension deficits as secondary
to broader processing deficits – in areas such
as memory-related abilities, for example.
While useful, these models cannot accurately
describe sentence comprehension.
The lack of a unifying theoretical framework
with respect to the domain-general account has
presented problems for fresh research projects
to gain headway in this field.
SENTENCE COMPREHENSION:
The ability to build grammatical
structure and develop semantic
meaning of ‘who did what to whom’
COGNITIVE PROCESSING: Mental
mechanisms such as simple
memory, complex memory,
controlled attention and lexical
retrieval, which may contribute to
sentence comprehension
SIMPLE MEMORY: The ability to
store information in the absence
of performing a concurrent
mental activity
COMPLEX MEMORY: The ability
to store information while
simultaneously performing some
kind of mental activity
CONTROLLED ATTENTION:
Attentional abilities such as
sustaining attention, switching
attention and updating information
in memory
LEXICAL RETRIEVAL SPEED:
The speed with which words from
the mental lexicon are accessed
and retrieved
www.internationalinnovation.com
73
INTELLIGENCE
COGNITIVE PROCESSING AND SENTENCE
COMPREHENSION IN SPECIFIC
LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT
OBJECTIVE
To examine specific cognitive mechanisms that
underlie sentence comprehension in children with
specific language impairment (SLI) via statistical
modelling techniques.
KEY COLLABORATORS
Dr Ronald B Gillam, Utah State University, USA
Dr Julia L Evans, University of Texas-Dallas, USA
FUNDING
National Institute on Deafness and Other
Communication Disorders
CONTACT
Dr James Montgomery
Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders
School of Rehabilitation and Communication Sciences
Communication Sciences and Disorders Grover Center
W231
Ohio University
Athens
Ohio 45701-2979
USA
T +1 740 593 1412
E [email protected]
http://bit.ly/DevelopmentalPsycholinguisticsLab
JAMES MONTGOMERY is
Professor of Communication
Sciences and Disorders at Ohio
University. His research focuses
on the cognitive and sentence
comprehension abilities in children
with SLI.
JULIA L EVANS examines the
neurobiology of learning and
memory in children with SLI, and
focuses on the basal ganglia system
and its role in abstract information
processing in SLI.
RONALD R GILLAM is the
Raymond and Eloise Lillywhite Chair
of Speech Language Pathology in
the Department of Communication
Disorders and Deaf Education at
Utah State University and examines
memory and narrative in SLI.
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INTERNATIONAL INNOVATION
MODELS OF COMPREHENSION
The majority of efforts to model relationships
between cognitive limitations and
sentence comprehension deficits have
been unsystematic. “Different theoretical
perspectives have been used, along with
a limited range of memory/attention and
comprehension measures, which have not
always been well-motivated or controlled,” the
researchers elaborate. As a result, there are
significant gaps in both the theoretical and
clinical understanding of SLI.
The project is therefore aiming to address
these gaps and shed new light on sentence
comprehension deficits in SLI. To this end, they
will build integrated theoretical and empirical
models of sentence comprehension, which
will enable them to assess the children’s
command of sentences that are controlled
for semantic plausibility. In other words, all
the sentences will make grammatical sense
but very little semantic sense. This will help
the team to establish the child’s ability to
ascertain the syntactic relationships between
elements in a sentence – that is, their syntactic
processing abilities.
Ultimately, the team will discover which model
of sentence comprehension in SLI is more
accurate: the domain-specific or the domaingeneral. Moreover, they will assess whether
universal cognitive mechanisms can explain
sentence comprehension in children with SLI.
It is anticipated that the insights the
researchers gain will contribute to a better
clinical understanding of SLI and may even lead
to novel approaches for improving sentence
comprehension. An intervention of this kind is
sorely needed, as children with receptive and
expressive deficits are generally less amenable
to intervention than those with expressive
deficits alone. They are also at greater risk
of academic failure, because the ability to
comprehend a sentence upon hearing it is
strongly related to reading comprehension – a
critical element of any child’s education.
INCREASING SENTENCE COMPLEXITY
The project will take the form of four integrated
studies conducted with 150 children with SLI
alongside 150 age-matched control children.
Specifically, the studies will investigate the
contribution of four elements to the accuracy
and speed of comprehension – memory
controlled attention, lexical retrieval and
retrieval interference – and to two basic and
two complex sentence types: subject-verbobject (eg. she loves him), passive (eg. the cat
was bitten by the dog), subject relative (where
the relative pronoun is used as subject of the
clause, eg. the dog that bit the cat ran away),
and object relative (where the relative pronoun
is used as object, eg. the cat the dog bit on the
nose ran into the house).
Children with receptive and
expressive deficits are less
amenable to intervention than
those with expressive deficits
alone [and] are at greater risk
of academic failure
As expected, the preliminary analyses suggest
that the performance of the SLI group is
significantly below that of the control group,
across all cognitive measures and each of
the sentence types. When the final results
come in, the team will be able to assess which
cognitive variables best explain SLI sentence
comprehension. Combining these findings with
the existing literature in language science,
they aim to develop interventions that integrate
cognitive skills, language learning principles
and evidence-based instructional approaches.
INNOVATIVE INTERVENTIONS
This large-scale study could transform
theoretical models of the relationship
between cognitive processing and language
comprehension in SLI, and unite disparate
findings on sentence comprehension in
children with SLI. The results will enable an
unprecedented understanding of the nature of
SLI sentence comprehension, by addressing
a fundamental theoretical dilemma – that
is, whether SLI sentence comprehension is
better described by a syntax-specific view or
a general cognitive processing one. Indeed,
the study will make significant contributions
to the understanding of language processing
by merging models of normal adult and SLI
sentence comprehension into one coherent
developmental framework.
While scientifically fascinating, the project
will be far from purely academic, and looks
set to have far-reaching implications, initially
providing novel markers of SLI. “The results
will tell us which cognitive measures best
differentiate children with SLI and their peers.
This issue is critically important, because we
are in need of sensitive markers of SLI,” the
group elucidates. In addition, understanding
the underlying cognitive mechanisms of SLI
may lead to the identification of novel targets
for language interventions. Looking ahead,
the team aims to develop these interventions
further, with the goal of improving the
auditory sentence comprehension, reading
comprehension and, ultimately, the academic
performance of children with SLI.