Montgomery, J. W., Gillam, R. B., & Evans, J. L. (2021). A New Memory Perspective on the Sentence Comprehension Deficits of School-Age Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Implications for Theory, Assessment, and Intervention. Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 52(2), 449–466. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_lshss-20-00128
Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often struggle with understanding complex sentences, but this difficulty is not due to language alone. In this article, Montgomery, Gillam, and Evans propose a new way of understanding sentence comprehension by examining how multiple cognitive factors work together. Children with DLD tend to have weaknesses in vocabulary, grammar, memory, and attention, all of which can impact their ability to interpret sentences, especially those with more complex structures. The authors introduce a model that highlights four key contributors: working memory, language knowledge stored in long-term memory, controlled attention, and fluid reasoning. Importantly, the results show that working memory plays a central “conduit” role, meaning it is the system through which the other factors influence sentence comprehension. For typically developing children, language knowledge and reasoning indirectly support comprehension through working memory, whereas children with DLD rely more heavily on controlled attention to support their understanding. This suggests that children with DLD may use different strategies to process language. Overall, the study emphasizes that sentence comprehension difficulties are best understood as the result of interacting cognitive processes, with working memory at the center, and highlights the importance of focusing on strengthening language—through both implicit and explicit approaches—when supporting sentence comprehension.
No comments:
Post a Comment