TECS-E needs to be normed and standardized before the complete assessment tool can be made available. Given our specific focus on complex sentences, which require the processing and integration of information from two clauses (Martin & McElree, 2009), it is not surprising that we find memory to play an important role. You expect to receive, or in the past 4 years have received, shared grant support or other funding with any of the authors. However, ... Approved - the paper is scientifically sound in its current form and only minor, if any, improvements are suggested. Keywords: Complex syntax, complex sentence, specific language impairment, language development, language disorders However, we also expected to be able to drop one predictor, depending on the results of our first analysis. Of the eight animations, four matched the structure and four did not. In addition, we have found that children's performance on language comprehension tests can be heavily influenced by the specific demands of the assessment method employed (Frizelle et al., 2017). I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and engaging with it. A total of 47 participants with DS were recruited to the study. When constructing sentences, it is important to always keep in mind that ideas should be parallel. This shows that children’s performance on TECS-E is not completely explained by their poor memory skills and that DS status makes an independent contribution to children’s performance on the task. Informed written consent was obtained from the parents/guardians of all participants. Parents/guardians confirmed the DS diagnosis. With the exception of 5 children with DS who attended special schools, all others attended mainstream schools. 2.1.1.1 'Milk', 'Mummy' 2.2 Groups of words may be used as a single unit. We document here how we have responded to each ... Botting N. Reviewer Report For: The understanding of complex syntax in children with Down syndrome [version 2; peer review: 3 approved], Jarrold C and Stathopoulou N. Reviewer Report For: The understanding of complex syntax in children with Down syndrome [version 2; peer review: 3 approved]. With the exception of two of the TECS-E practice items, which are fully available, the source code for the remainder of TECS-E is uploaded with dummy videos to allow it to run. The question is of course what exactly constitutes “complex syntax.”. Descriptive analysis of different clause types. Several studies suggest that the receptive vocabulary of those with DS is in keeping with that of cognitively matched children with typical development, (Chapman et al., 1991; Laws & Bishop, 2003; Miller, 1995) while other studies suggest a lower performance from those with DS (Caselli et al., 2008; Hick et al., 2005; Price et al., 2007). A number representing the real part of the complex number. Syntactic complexity is often taken to be the opposite of coordination: it is mostly associated with non-linearity and degrees of subordination. It accounted for 6% of the variance in TROG-2 score (r2 = 0.06 p = 0.009). This was in stark contrast to the two control groups, the majority of whom performed above chance level (74%) in the CI group and all of whom performed above chance in the TD group. A qualified statistician is required. favour or employment) as a result of your submission. For our main hypothesis, the best estimate of effect size came from prior studies that compared those with Down syndrome to TD controls on composite measures of syntactic comprehension. In addition, we calculated the 95% confidence interval around the R2 values in the regressions using the CI.Rsqlm function from the psychometric package in R. This was used to compare total explained variance of predictors in both dependent measures. 2) Binomial Theorem was used to establish a response threshold that was above chance for the TECS-E and TROG assessments. Overall, the results showed that the DS group performed more poorly on the majority of the test sentences than both control groups. In relation to the factors that would predict performance in children’s ability to understand complex sentences, our results, for the most part, are in line with what we predicted. Given that people with DS have a cognitive impairment, we anticipated that these tasks may underestimate their comprehension abilities. Description of the videos included in the sentence verification task. The parameter estimates from the final model (Table 6) can be found in Table 7. As before, mental age was entered into the model first to control for its effect. Participants listened to a target word or sentence and from a choice of four, they were required to identify the corresponding picture. We would like to thank the children with Down syndrome who took part in the project and their parents and teachers who facilitated data collection. By hearing the target sentence and seeing the animation at the same time, they can process the sentence in real time as they would in natural conversation. Both studies report similar findings to those in the current study, whereby those with DS performed more poorly than those with CI of unknown aetiology (Chapman, 2006) and those with Fragile X syndrome (Abbeduto et al., 2003). Visuo-spatial memory was assessed using a version of the block recall test from the WMTB-C (Pickering & Gathercole, 2001) adapted for tablet presentation. Our first hypothesis was that, based on the performance of young TD children, children with Down syndrome would be able to perform at above chance level on complex sentences when assessed using the sentence-verification task (TECS-E), designed to minimise extra linguistic and cognitive demands. Finally, the DS variable was entered into the model, accounting for a further 1.2% of the variance in children’s performance on this assessment. The email address should be the one you originally registered with F1000. References. You can also read all the peer review reports by downloading the PDF. A description of each of the animations is available in Supplementary File 1. This resulted in 33 children with DS participating in the study. Individuals are required to pass all four items within each block and testing is discontinued when the individual fails five consecutive blocks. We expected to replicate the finding that participants with Down syndrome have poor verbal short-term memory but preserved visuo-spatial memory relative to mental-age-matched controls (Jarrold & Baddeley, 2010). The 95% confidence intervals overlapped (TECS-E: 0.576–0.775; TROG-2: 0.656–0.823), indicating that the difference in magnitude between the estimates was not reliable. A full article citation will be automatically included. Default 0. These struc-tures occur relatively infrequently in spoken language, but when students use them in written language, it indicates they have achieved more advanced levels of gram-mar. The test sentences were chosen on the basis of pilot work carried out by the first author, work completed by Diessel & Tomasello (2000); Diessel & Tomasello (2005) and research by Frizelle & Fletcher (2014) and Frizelle et al. There is the possibility of response bias when completing a task that requires a yes/no response, whereby the child may always give a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response when they do not understand the construction presented. Here, the results were contrary to our predictions in that there was a highly significant effect of DS. Children were asked if what was shown in the animation matched the sentence they heard and to respond by touching either the smiley or sad face on the Surface Pro 4 tablet touch screen. A strong relationship between memory and syntax has also emerged. This result is consistent with previous findings (see Finestack et al., 2013; Joffe & Varlokosta, 2009; Laws & Bishop, 2003; Pennington et al., 2003; Price et al., 2007; Rosin et al., 1988). METHODS: Participants were children with or without DD (N = 60) participating in a longitudinal study of development. However, when the animations did not match the sentence the action was carried out on the alternative (the other girl). In this paper we are concerned with complements that serve as the object of the main clause. However, it is important to note that most of these studies have used the same assessment measures, with a significant focus on morphology and simple syntax and few embedded sentences. Subordination is of particular interest as it allows for the expression of thoughts that involve hierarchical relationships between ideas, rather than just chaining them together. Email or password not correct. In this analysis we calculated the proportion of children in each group that passed each construction on the sentence verification task (shown in Table 8), where a pass was defined as a score of 7 or 8 out of 8 items correct. 1.1 Syntactical development. Is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it cite the current literature? On the TROG- 2 (a multiple-choice comprehension task), both the DS and the CI group performed very poorly, with no children passing a block of items testing complex sentence comprehension; furthermore, only a minority of the TD children showed evidence of understanding these items. Our third prediction was that children with Down syndrome would have greater difficulty understanding comparable constructions on the TROG-2 (a multiple-choice comprehension task), than on TECS-E. These comparison groups were broadly equated to those with Down syndrome on a non-verbal measure of mental age. The information that you give us will be displayed next to your comment. The relative clauses were all full bi-clausal relatives, each attached to the direct object of a transitive clause. As we highlighted previously, linguistic tests using these multiple-choice tasks are high in executive cognitive demands (Frizelle et al., 2017) and likely to disadvantage those with cognitive impairment of any aetiology (including those with DS, Fragile X, Williams syndrome etc). However, as outlined in relation to the TROG-2, standardized tests tend to use a developmental design, where simple sentences are presented before those that are more complex and a ceiling rule is usually applied whereby the test is discontinued following a pre-specified number of incorrect responses (in this case three). Accordingly we aimed for a sample of 30 participants per group. Again, our results did not support our prediction, in that the children with DS performed at a dramatically lower level than both control groups. All test sentences were pre-recorded by a native female English speaker. A child, 12 months old, will be studied through transcripts, video and audio over the course of a year. Our result is somewhat surprising given the complex syntactic expressive data reported on by Thordardottir et al. A summary of the findings comparing those with DS with other groups, on their understanding of syntax is shown in Table 1. Please confirm that you accept the User Comment Terms and Conditions. Previous studies have tended to use multiple-choice tasks that have a heavy cognitive load and make demands beyond the linguistic. 2 One word stage . scientific mentor, recent student). The understanding of complex syntax in children with Down syndrome [version 2; peer review: 3 approved]. Individuals with DS have been reported to produce fewer complex noun phrases, verb phrases, sentence structures, questions and negations than TD individuals of a similar non-verbal age (Price et al., 2008). Nevertheless, Frizelle et al. Scoring was automated and saved to a .csv file. (2017); Frizelle et al. Those with typical development were recruited from mainstream schools and preschools, and those with CI were recruited from both special and mainstream schools. Our pre-registered hypotheses https://osf.io/5ntvc/ were as follows: 1) Individuals with DS will be able to understand a range of the complex sentences tested, although we expect considerable individual variation. Within the complement clause constructions assessed, wish and pretend presented the least difficulty and think constructions were most difficult for children to understand. In the standardized measure (TROG-2; Bishop, 2003) children must show an understanding of the syntactically simple constructions before they progress on to those that are more complex. The programme was designed so that the number of attempts could only equal the number of target monsters. However, there are two important distinctions between the TROG-2 (Bishop, 2003) and the sentence verification task used in the current study. I cannot comment. Each participant also completed an assent form. In a second regression we compared the two groups with intellectual disability and included age in the model. They were given the opportunity to hear each sentence-animation pairing more than once if needed, however this was rarely asked for. Beginning with one and gradually increasing in number, monsters were revealed for a period of 4 seconds. The Development of Complex Syntax and Mood-Selection Abilities by Intermediate-Level Learners of Spanish Joseph Collentine East Carolina University Abstract: Foreign language learners of Spanish seemingly cannot master mood selection-the indicative/ subjunctive distinction-by the end of the intermediate level of instruction (within four semesters). Size of 86, monsters were revealed for a period of 4 seconds a more discussion... For use in the acquisition of Hebrew root usage, Psycholinguistics research group: language acquisition is an of... 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