Testing the Tolerance Principle: Children with Developmental Language Disorder

Description

Background: Understanding the mechanisms underlying the generalization of linguistic rules is essential to studying language acquisition, particularly for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), who display persistent difficulties in acquiring and using language―oftentimes in the morphosyntactic domain―with heterogeneous linguistic profiles and degrees of severity
that can strongly impact life’s quality. The Tolerance Principle (TP) (Yang, 2016) provides a framework for investigating linguistic productivity in typical development. It states that morphological rules are generalized when the cost of memorizing exceptions does not outweigh the efficiency of applying the rule. The TP applicability to children with DLD has not yet been assessed.
Objectives: Investigate whether the TP can predict regular plural generalization in children with DLD and compare their learning patterns to their non-DLD peers. We seek to connect theoretical psycholinguistics with clinical practice, potentially guiding targeted therapeutic strategies.
Methods: In a within-subjects design, 200 Portuguese speakers (100 DLD children, 50 typically developing children, and 50 adults) will undergo a controlled artificial language learning paradigm. Across two conditions (one that triggers rule acquisition and one that does not), participants will learn pseudowords in singular and plural forms (e.g., zɔmu/zɔmupa). Rule acquisition will be tested in a “Wug test” format to evaluate the predictive accuracy of the TP.
Results: Data collection is ongoing. We predict one of two possible outcomes for the DLD group: (a) they demonstrate TP-consistent rule generalization, paralleling typically developing peers; or (b) they follow input frequency patterns but fail to acquire a regular morphological rule.
Conclusions: The findings will clarify the applicability of the TP to DLD and discuss how their profiles and severity affect language learning, informing both linguistic theory and evidence-based clinical practice for language disorders.

Period	27 Sept 2024
Event title	12th European Congress of Speech and Language Therapy (ESLA)
Event type	Conference
Location	Bruges, BelgiumShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International