Enhancing Syntactic Knowledge in School-Age Children With Developmental Language Disorder: The Promise of Syntactic Priming

Abstract

Purpose: We propose that implicit learning, including syntactic priming, has therapeutic promise to enhance the syntactic knowledge of children with developmental language disorder (DLD).

Method: We review the chunk-based learning framework of syntactic learning, the developmental evidence in support of it, and the developmental literature on syntactic priming as an instance of chunk-based statistical learning. We use this framework to help understand the nature of the syntactic learning difficulties of children with DLD. We then briefly review the available explicit treatments for syntactic deficits and end by proposing an implicit training activity that integrates syntactic priming with the principles of statistical learning.

Results: Statistically induced chunk-based learning is a powerful driver of syntactic learning, and syntactic priming is a form of this learning. Repeated priming episodes during everyday language interactions lead children to create abstract and global syntactic representations in long-term memory. We offer some thoughts on an implicit language intervention approach with syntactic priming at its center.

Conclusions: Children's learning of syntactic structures is influenced by repeated syntactic priming experiences. Including a syntactic priming activity in our language intervention toolbox has the promise to enhance children's syntactic knowledge and sentence comprehension and production abilities.

Figure 1.

Simplified structural model of sentence comprehension reflecting the relationship between cognitive processing and sentence comprehension. The model represents the indirect (mediated) influences of fluid reasoning (pattern recognition), controlled attention (sustained attention, attention switching), and language long-term memory (LTM; chunking of input, use of word order templates) and the mediating influence of working memory (WM; central storage component, peripheral storage component) on the comprehension of simple and complex structures.