A study on the visual movement of kids with speech language impairment reveals they have more difficulties in the expression rather than the comprehension of simple sentences

The Speech Language Impairment is an alteration in oral language acquisition 7 % of kids suffer from during schooling years. This disorder has to be detected on time because it can cause problems during school learning, mainly in reading (dyslexia), writing (dysgraphia), and mathematics (dyscalculia). “The affected kids know what they want to say, but they do not find the words to do so”, says Llorenç Andreu, director of the master degree in Learning Difficulties and Language Disorders at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). “They have a reduced vocabulary regarding its age, difficulties to use verb tenses and they skip articles, prepositions, conjunctions or pronouns”, adds the expert.

So far, several studies proved the kind of mistakes in the production of language in kids with this disorder, but only a few explored their skills to understand in real time the lexical (meaning of words) and morphosyntactic (meaning of a set of words) elements. A research project conducted by the UOC and the University of Barcelona (UB), based on a sample of 25 kids with TEL aged between 5 and 6, 50 kids with common language development and 30 adults, has focused on this field of knowledge during three years (2015-2018), applying a pioneer technique from the group, the eye tracking, based on recording visual movements.

This kind of tracking enabled researchers to analyse in real time the language process in a natural way without introducing any task apart from listening to sentences while observing related scenes. “The looks are related to the attention and length of a fixation that corresponds to the length of the observed cognitive process”, says Andreu, researcher who co-led this research.

The results of the project, “Analysis of linguistic comprehension on primary education children with language difficulties through visual movement records (COMTELMO)”, supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitive within the State Program Funding of Excellence Scientific Research, show that kids understand properly the linguistic units within a context of simple sentences, such as “The girl ate/will eat an apple” or “The cat is on/under the table”. “This enabled limiting the profile of difficulties for the kids and detecting that many of their difficulties in simple sentences lie on the expression rather than the comprehension”, states the supervisor of the study, Mònica Sanz-Torrent, UB researcher.

“Problems are focused on the planning and production mechanisms of the message. Therefore, results allow us advancing on knowing the causes for the alterations in language in kids with TEL and have important education and clinical implications, since the intervention work has to focus on improving production so as to preserve the understanding of simple sentences”, adds the expert.

The project, promoted by the Cognition and Language Research Group, consisted on a series of six experiments based on the recording of visual movements in oral comprehension, with the presentation of audios and images.

The objective of the experiments was to analyse how and at which moment the oral comprehension of sentences receives the processing of different lexical units and their morphological marks, and to focus on the role of the interaction between the lexical and semantic characteristics with the sintactic and grammatical ones.