Acquisition and online processing of Voice in children with Developmental Language Disorder: Is non-active morphology a clinical marker?

• Applicant: Dr. Anastasia Paspali
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2021 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 452974831

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) affects approximately 7% of the preschool population and influences children's academic performance, educational progress, future employability, and career development. It affects children's communication skills and social interactions. Despite its high prevalence, public awareness of DLD is lower than other neurodevelopmental disorders. Thus, DLD often remains undetected and mis-/under-diagnosed. Furthermore, most studies on DLD have mainly focused on English, while evidence from other languages remains more limited. This evidence needs to be expanded to better understand which grammatical structures are affected within each language. Passive voice has been widely explored in children with DLD in English, showing that they exhibit major difficulties with passives primarily stemming from difficulties in matching the passive grammatical form with the correct interpretation (i.e., in passives, as opposed to actives, the subject of the sentence is the patient/theme and not the doer/agent of the action). These difficulties hinder daily communication and school performance since passives are part of academic language used in school, e.g., in physics and maths, in news and more formal aspects of communication and writing. The present study tested the acquisition of voice in children with DLD in a less studied language, Greek, in comprehension, production, and online processing, as well as the diagnostic accuracy in children’s production errors. Greek voice is more complex compared to English because the “passive” grammatical form is used to denote not only a passive interpretation but also other interpretations (i.e., anticausative, reflexive etc). Because of this ambiguity (i.e., the “passive” form matches multiple meanings and not only a passive one), Greek children with DLD were expected to show severe difficulties. Sixty children participated in several tasks measuring performance on voice, cognitive and language skills. Children with DLD exhibited severe difficulties in passive and anticausative verbs marked with the “passive” grammatical form compared to typically developing children of the same chronological age and younger children of the same language age. They also exhibited lower verbal working memory, vocabulary and grammar skills but intact non-verbal intelligence. The production of the “passive” grammatical form was positively predicted by verbal working memory and grammar skills. Furthermore, the production of Greek voice exhibited good diagnostic accuracy and passive and anticausative verbs exhibited high sensitivity diagnosing children with DLD as such. These findings are highly informative for clinical diagnosis, teaching and clinical practice because they reveal that “passive” voice may form a clinical marker for DLD and that it requires clinical/teaching interventions by means of enhancing both language and verbal working memory skills.

Publications

• Voice acquisition in children with Developmental Language Disorder. Annual Meeting of Department of Linguistics (AMGL42), 6-8 May, Thessaloniki. Greece.
  Paspali, A.
  
• Sentence repetition in Greek children with Developmental Language Disorder. International Conference on Greek Linguistics 16 (ICGL16), 14-17 December, Thessaloniki, Greece.
  Paspali, A., Papadopoulou, D., Marinis, T., Triantafylla, A., Kyriakidou R. & A. Alexiadou
  
• Exploring the intersections of Linguistics and Language Teaching: Second Language Acquisition and Developmental Language Disorder. Interview-Podcast with EduDialogues podcast.
  Paspali, A.
  
• Non-active voice in Greek children with Developmental Language Disorder, 12th European Congress of Speech and Language Therapy (ESLA12), 26 - 28 September 2024. Bruges, Belgium.
  Paspali, A., Papadopoulou, D., Marinis, T., Varlokosta, S. & A. Alexiadou
  
• Non-active voice in Greek children with Developmental Language Disorder: evidence from Sentence Repetition. Language Disorders in Greek 9, Athens, Greece.
  Paspali, A., Papadopoulou, D., Marinis, T., Varlokosta, S. & A. Alexiadou
  
• Postdoctoral workshop on Teaching R statistical programming language; 2-4 February, LingLab, Thessaloniki, Greece.
  Paspali, A.
  
• The grammatical skills of children with Developmental Language Disorder at preschool and school age: evidence from Sentence Repetition, 4th Scientific conference of the association of speech pathologists and speech therapists of Greece, 1-3 November 2024, Kalamata, Greece (in Greek).
  Paspali, A., Varlokosta, S., Papadopoulou, D., Taha, J., Mountouris, G., Marinis, T. & A. Alexiadou
  
• When morphology is not enough: The acquisition of voice in monolingual Greek children and bilingual children with Greek as a heritage language. Language Acquisition, 32(3), 297-327.
  Paspali, Anastasia; Marinis, Theodoros & Alexiadou, Artemis