Article (Scientific journals)
The impact of lexical frequency on sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment
Leclercq, Anne-Lise; Majerus, Steve; Jacob, Laura et al.
2014In Research in Developmental Disabilities, 35, p. 472-481
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Keywords :
sentence comprehension; specific language impairment; lexical frequency; vocabulary; processing resources
Abstract :
[en] Children with SLI generally exhibit poor sentence comprehension skills. We examined the specific impact of grammatical complexity and lexical frequency on comprehension performance, yielding contrasting results. The present study sheds new light on sentence comprehension in children with SLI by investigating a linguistic factor which has attracted little research interest: the impact of the lexical frequency of known words on sentence comprehension. We also examined the impact of grammatical complexity and sentence length by independently varying these two factors. Fifteen children with SLI, 15 age- and IQ-matched controls, and 15 controls matched on lexical and grammatical skills, performed sentence comprehension tasks in which three linguistic factors were manipulated: lexical frequency (sentences containing words of either low or high lexical frequency), grammatical complexity (sentence containing either a subject relative clause or an object relative clause) and sentence length (either short or long sentences). Results indicated that children with SLI performed more poorly overall compared to age- and IQmatched children and to lexical and morphosyntactic age-matched children. However, their performance was not more affected by either sentence length or clause type than that of control children. Only lexical frequency affected sentence comprehension to a greater extent in children with SLI relative to the control groups, revealing that SLI children’s sentence comprehension abilities are particularly affected by the presence of lowfrequency but familiar words.
Disciplines :
Theoretical & cognitive psychology
Author, co-author :
Leclercq, Anne-Lise  ;  Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de Psychologie : cognition et comportement > Logopédie clinique
Majerus, Steve  ;  Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de Psychologie : cognition et comportement > Psychopathologie cognitive
Jacob, Laura
Maillart, Christelle  ;  Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de Psychologie : cognition et comportement > Logopédie clinique
Language :
English
Title :
The impact of lexical frequency on sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment
Publication date :
2014
Journal title :
Research in Developmental Disabilities
ISSN :
0891-4222
eISSN :
1873-3379
Publisher :
Elsevier Science
Volume :
35
Pages :
472-481
Peer reviewed :
Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi
Funders :
F.R.S.-FNRS - Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique
Available on ORBi :
since 31 January 2014

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