Shanju Lin & Amanda J. Owen Van Horne

1. Attending to & describing motion events in children with SLI 7724 Shanju Lin & Amanda J. Owen Van Horne Deptof Communication Sciences and Disorders & DeLTA Center University of Iowa Introduction • Motion events • One object moves with respect to another object. Talmy, 1975, 1985 • Children with TD • Cognition and language of motion events are early developed. • 18-month-olds detect object, trajectory, and the whole motion. • Raskin & Poulin-Dubois, 2002 • By age 3, language-specific expressions are learned. • Choi & Bowerman, 1991; Berman & Slobin, 1994; Sebastián & Slobin, 1994 • Regardless of language and age, speakers show similar perception for motion elements. Gennariet al., 2002, Lin & Owen Van Horne, in prep; • Papafragou et al., 2002, Papafragou & Selimis, 2010 • Amount of information included in motion description increases with age. • Chen & Guo, 2010; Lin & Owen Van Horne, in prep; Slobin, 2004 • Children with SLI • Often described as having a gap between their linguistic and cognitive abilities • Use more general-all-purpose (GAP) verbs (e.g., come, go) rather than • specific verbs expressing manner or path (e.g., jump, enter) Rice & Bode, 1993 • Have weaker semantic representations for verbs McGregor et al., 2012 • Have different biases • when interpreting novel verbs: result-oriented interpretation, rather than motion interpretation Kelly & Rice, 1994 • when learning verb argument structures: more errors for change-of-state verbs (e.g., fill, cover) than change-of-location verbs (e.g., put, pour) • Ebbels, et al., 2007 • Involves cognition and language • English speakers tend to describe motion • events in manner verbsand use prepositional phrases for path, source and goal. Research Questions Do children with SLI attend to and describe same motion elements as their TD peers? If there are attentional biases in children with SLI, are those biases associated with description biases?

2. Method • Stimuli • Categorization task: Which of two change videos • goes with the baseline video? Participants 24 triads of videos Baseline Change videos: Differ minimally from the baseline on Manner, Path, Source, or Goal to examine element bias/priority Manner Change Goal Change • Description task: Describe the 24 baseline videos Tasks adapted from Papafragou et al. (2002) & Gennari et al. (2002) Description Coding Results Categorization task • All children fail to notice Source changes or consider them less relevant. • SLI group show a stronger Goal bias. • MLU group show a stronger Source bias, but not stronger than other element biases. * * * * Element Bias: F(3,201)=90.230, p< .001, ηp2 = 0.574 S < M, P, G, p< .001; G < M, P, p < .05 M = P, p> .99 Group x Element Bias: F(9,201)=2.258, p= .02, ηp2 = 0.091 Goal: SLI > AGE, p = .046; SLI > MLU, p = .044 Source:SLI < MLU, p = .041; AGE < MLU, p = .01 All other group comparisons n.s., p> .103 Group: F(3,67)=0.073, p = .974 Description task * * * * * * Group: F(2,48)=9.491, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.283 SLI < AGE, p = .003, MLU < AGE, p < .001 Element: F(3,144)=36.428, p< .001, ηp2 = 0.431 M = P = G > S (S vs. other, p < .001) Group x Element: F(6,144)=4.744, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.165 Manner: SLI < MLU, p = .02 SLI = AGE, p = .134 Path: AGE > MLU, p = .006 Goal: SLI > MLU, p = .003 AGE > MLU, p = .001 Source:SLI < AGE, p = .003 MLU < AGE, p = .003 All other group comparisons n.s. all p >.17 F(2,48)=9.489, p < .001, η2 = 0.28 SLI < AGE, p = .003 MLU < AGE, p < .001 SLI = MLU, p = .383 • Compared to AGE group, SLI group are less likely to describe Source (and marginal for Manner) • SLI group show a strong Goal Bias • The chicken wented to the swingset. • The ant goed to the truck. • MLU group show a strong Manner Bias • A hippo was driving a car. • A pig was flying. • AGE group talk about Path, Goal, and Source more than MLU group. SLI & MLU-matches both tended to mention between 1 & 2 motion elements. Age-matches: between 2 & 3

3. Conclusions • Children with SLI attend to and talk about different motion elements compared to their TD peers. • Children with SLI show attentional biases on goal, which is consistent with the fact that their responses tend to include goal also. • They rely heavily on GAP verbs, making it less likely that they mention manner. • Goal is perceptually salient to children with SLI and thus may lead weaker representations of manner verbs. • Goal represents a final reference point and is often more persistent in the stimuli. • Following Kelly & Rice (1993), children with SLI may have different attentional biases such that they notice results, which change their verb learning profiles. • Following Ebbels et al. (2007), children with SLI show weaker semantic representations of change-of-state verbs than change-of-location verbs • We hypothesize that weak verb representations (McGregor, et al., 2012) in children with SLI may be related to language deficits and attentional biases. • If children with SLI do not attend equally well to some elements in events, their representations of elements like manner might be relatively weak and less likely to be associated with a verb. • Clinical Implications • Teach verbs and test children’s verb use in more complex contexts, e.g., multiple motion elements • Direct children’s attention to manner when teaching motion verbs • Teach manner verbs with various prepositional phrases (over, under, from, to, etc) Works Cited Berman, R., & Slobin, D. I. (Eds.). (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguisticdevelopmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2003). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin- Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 387-427). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chen, L., & Guo, J. (2010). From language structures to language use: A case from Mandarin motion expression classification. Chinese Language and Discourse, 1(1), 31-65. Choi, S., & Bowerman, M. (1991). Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns. Cognition, 41, 83-122.. Ebbels, S.H., van der Lely, H.K, & Dockrell, J.E. (2007). Intervention for verb argument structure in children with persistent SLI: A randomized control trial. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 1330-1349. Finneran, D. A., Francis, A. L., & Leonard, L. B. (2009). Sustained attention in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 52(4), 915-929. Gennari, S., Sloman, S., Malt, B., & Fitch, W. (2002). Motion events in language and cognition. Cognition, 83, 49-79. Kelly, D. J. & Rice, M. L. (1993). Preferences for verb interpretation in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 37, 182-192. Lin, S. & Owen Van Horne, A.J. (in preparation). Describing complex motion events in English- and Mandarin-speaking children: testing verb advantage hypothesis. McGregor, K. K., Berns, A. J., Owen, A. J., Michels, S. A., Duff, D., Bahnsen, A. J., et al. (2012). Associations between syntax and the lexicon among children with or without ASD and language impairment. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42(1), 35-47. Papafragou, A., Massey, C., & Gleitman, L. (2002). Shake, rattle, ‘n’ roll: The representation of motion in language and cognition. Cognition, 84, 189-219. Papafragou, A., & Selimis, S. (2010). Event categorisation and language: A cross-linguistic study of motion. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(2), 224-260. Rakison, D. H. & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2002). You go this way and I’ll go that way: developmental changes in infant’s detection of correlation among static and dynamic features in motion events. Child Development, 73, 682-699. Rice, M. L., & Bode, J. V. (1993). GAPS in the verb lexicons of children with specific language impairment. First Language, 13, 113-131. Sebastián, E., & Slobin, D. I. (1994). Development of linguistic forms: Spanish. In R. A. Berman & D. I. Slobin (Eds.), Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study (pp. 239-284). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Slobin, D. I. (2004). The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In S. Stro¨mqvist & L. Verhoeven (Eds.), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives (pp. 219-257). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Talmy, L. (1975). Semantics and syntax of motion. In J. P. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. IV, pp. 181-238). New York: Academic Press. Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description. Vol. III: Grammatical categories and the lexicon (pp. 57-149). New York: Cambridge University Press. Acknowledgements We thank Karla McGregor, Bob McMurray, Word learning Lab, and MACLab at the University of Iowa for help and comments on the experimental design and stimuli. We also thank Allison Haskill at Augustana College, Betty Merrifield and the Scottish Rite Program, and Grantwood AEA for all the help with this project, and the members of Grammar Acquisition Lab at University of Iowa for data collection. This project is funded by a Pre-doctoral Scholarship from Ministry of Education, Taiwan awarded to Shanju Lin, and a University of Iowa Internal Funding Initiative awarded to Amanda J. Owen Van Horne. Contacts: shan-ju-lin@uiowa.edu, amanda-owen-vanhorne@uiowa.edu