Number agreement processing in adolescents with and without developmental language disorder (DLD): evidence from event-related brain potentials.

In morphologically richer languages, including French, one must learn the specific properties of number agreement in order to understand the language, and this learning process continues into adolescence. This study examined similarities and differences between French-speaking adolescents with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) when processing number agreement, and investigated how morpho-syntactic regularity affected language processing. Using event-related potentials (ERP) and only grammatical sentences with audio-visual mismatches, we studied ERP correlates to three types of number agreement: (1) regular determiner agreement in noun phrases, (2) regular subject-verb plural liaison, and (3) irregular subject-verb agreement.

Identifying Linguistic Markers of French-Speaking Teenagers With Developmental Language Disorder: Which Tasks Matter?

Purpose: This research aimed to identify reliable tasks discriminating French-speaking adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) from their peers with typical language (TL) and to assess which linguistic domains represent areas of particular weakness in DLD. Unlike English, morphosyntax has not been identified as a special area of weakness when compared with lexicosemantics in French preschoolers with DLD. Since there is evidence that subject-verb number agreement is consolidated in later childhood, one might expect morphosyntax to be a particular weakness and marker of French DLD only in (pre)adolescence.

Corrigendum: Eliciting ERP Components for Morphosyntactic Agreement Mismatches in Perfectly Grammatical Sentences.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.

Eliciting ERP Components for Morphosyntactic Agreement Mismatches in Perfectly Grammatical Sentences.

The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates mechanisms underlying the processing of morphosyntactic information during real-time auditory sentence comprehension in French. Employing an auditory-visual sentence-picture matching paradigm, we investigated two types of anomalies using entirely grammatical auditory stimuli: (i) semantic mismatches between visually presented actions and spoken verbs, and (ii) number mismatches between visually presented agents and corresponding morphosyntactic number markers in the spoken sentences (determiners, pronouns in liaison contexts, and verb-final "inflection"). We varied the type and amount of number cues available in each sentence using two manipulations.