TY - JOUR
T1 - Prosodic boundary effects on syntactic disambiguation in children with cochlear implants
AU - Fortunato-Tavares, Talita
AU - Schwartz, Richard G.
AU - Marton, Klara
AU - de Andrade, Claudia F.
AU - Houston, Derek
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was part of the doctoral dissertation of the first author under the direction of the second author, and the research was supported by grants from Fapesp (2012/24837-4) to the first author and National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (5R01DC011041) to the second author. The authors thank the children and families who participated.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/5
Y1 - 2018/5
N2 - Purpose: This study investigated prosodic boundary effects on the comprehension of attachment ambiguities in children with cochlear implants (CIs) and normal hearing (NH) and tested the absolute boundary hypothesis and the relative boundary hypothesis. Processing speed was also investigated. Method: Fifteen children with NH and 13 children with CIs (ages 8–12 years) who are monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese participated in a computerized comprehension task with sentences containing prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity and manipulations of prosodic boundaries. Results: Children with NH and children with CIs differed in how they used prosodic forms to disambiguate sentences. Children in both groups provided responses consistent with half of the predictions of the relative boundary hypothesis. The absolute boundary hypothesis did not characterize the syntactic disambiguation of children with CIs. Processing speed was similar in both groups. Conclusions: Children with CIs do not use prosodic information to disambiguate sentences or to facilitate comprehension of unambiguous sentences similarly to children with NH. The results suggest that cross-linguistic differences may interact with syntactic disambiguation. Prosodic contrasts that affect sentence comprehension need to be addressed directly in intervention with children with CIs.
AB - Purpose: This study investigated prosodic boundary effects on the comprehension of attachment ambiguities in children with cochlear implants (CIs) and normal hearing (NH) and tested the absolute boundary hypothesis and the relative boundary hypothesis. Processing speed was also investigated. Method: Fifteen children with NH and 13 children with CIs (ages 8–12 years) who are monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese participated in a computerized comprehension task with sentences containing prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity and manipulations of prosodic boundaries. Results: Children with NH and children with CIs differed in how they used prosodic forms to disambiguate sentences. Children in both groups provided responses consistent with half of the predictions of the relative boundary hypothesis. The absolute boundary hypothesis did not characterize the syntactic disambiguation of children with CIs. Processing speed was similar in both groups. Conclusions: Children with CIs do not use prosodic information to disambiguate sentences or to facilitate comprehension of unambiguous sentences similarly to children with NH. The results suggest that cross-linguistic differences may interact with syntactic disambiguation. Prosodic contrasts that affect sentence comprehension need to be addressed directly in intervention with children with CIs.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85047271454
U2 - 10.1044/2018_JSLHR-L-17-0036
DO - 10.1044/2018_JSLHR-L-17-0036
M3 - Article
C2 - 29800355
AN - SCOPUS:85047271454
SN - 1092-4388
VL - 61
SP - 1188
EP - 1202
JO - Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
JF - Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
IS - 5
ER -