Recovery from semantic prediction violations during sentence processing in preschoolers with and without developmental language disorder.

Abstract

Prediction is an important component of language comprehension, and language users may pre-activate multiple possible lexical continuations to different degrees. However, it remains unclear whether children with developmental language disorder (DLD) generate graded predictions and recover from prediction violations in the same way as their typically developing (TD) peers. The present study investigated graded lexical activation during real-time comprehension of sentences with unexpected endings in preschool-aged children with developmental language disorder (N = 34) and age-matched typically developing (TD) children (N = 41) using a visual-world eye-tracking paradigm. Children listened to transitive sentences in which the verb supported a locally coherent but globally unpredictable continuation (e.g., "The pirate chases the CAT"; action-related condition) or an unrelated continuation (e.g., "The pirate chases the BONES"; unrelated condition), while viewing corresponding images. Both children with TD and DLD generated graded predictions with anticipatory fixations to action-related referents prior to theme onset. In contrast, the TD group showed more sustained benefits from the action-related condition than the DLD group following the theme onset. These findings suggest that early differences in DLD may arise not from impaired prediction generation, but from reduced ability to maintain and use updated semantic representations over time.