汉语SLI儿童快速映射词语学习缺陷的原因:语音记忆还是语义表征?

The Reasons for the Deficiencies of Chinese Children with Specific Language Impairment in Fast Mapping Word Learning: Phonological Working Memory or Semantic Representation?

本文采用快速映射任务,考察了汉语SLI儿童的词语学习能力。根据汉语词汇的特点,所学的词语包括带语素词语和不带语素词语。结果显示,汉语SLI儿童在词语理解和产出上都显著弱于典型发展儿童。这种损伤一方面可能来自于语义加工缺陷,表现为无法和典型发展儿童一样有效地利用语素意义,在学习带语素词语上较弱,另一方面可能来自于语音工作记忆缺陷,表现为在学习无语素类词语上要显著地弱于典型发展儿童。

The purpose of this study was to explore if Chinese children with Specific Language Impairment(SLI)had some difficulties in learning words,and if they can benefit from the meaningful morpheme in a word.At the same time,the effect of phonological working memory on SLI s word learning was also investigated.16 Chinese children with SLI and 16 age-matched peers attended this study.By using the fast mapping paradigm,we tested word abilities of these children via comprehension test and production test.We divided the two-syllables target words into four categories:word with a characteristic morpheme and a categorical morpheme(below called as“characteristic-category word”for short),word with a characteristic morpheme and a meaningless syllable(characteristic word),word with a meaningless syllable and a categorical morpheme(categorical word)and word with two meaningless syllables(non-morpheme word).The amount of semantic information to be processed and the requirements for phonological working memory were different within each type of words,which facilitated the study of the abilities of semantic processing and working memory of these children.This study showed that Chinese children with SLI had difficulties in learning new words.In terms of using morpheme information,they could to some extent retrieve and activate the existing morpheme knowledge,proved by the fact that they performed better on words with semantic morpheme than non-morpheme words,and better on words with two morphemes than words with one.However,SLI still showed deficiency compared with typical developing children.They performed worse in most of the tasks except comprehension on characteristic-category words,which suggested that they may have weak semantic representations to support them to retrieve and produce words effectively.In terms of phonological working memory,the fact that they performed worse on non-morpheme words learning and nonword repetition reflected their deficiency in phonological working memory,which may also be a reason for SLI s word learning difficulties.