Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

Figure 72. Difference between the experiments in the SLI group (F3, Fz, F4
electrodes)
These results indicate that the dissociation between the processes related to the
constituent and operator projections of the clause does not exist in the group of
participants with SLI. Since the dissociation is most prominent in the group of adult
speakers, modularization of language processing can be understood as a final stage of
language development and optimal way of language processing. Children with SLI do not
process sentences this way, but instead, they process the sentences in an impropriate way.
Perhaps they never reach the final stage in the language development and develop some
compensatory mechanisms (good behavioral results of the SLI children who attended
therapy and, in fact, learned the tasks through practice can be a behavioral correlate of
these mechanisms).
These results are not in accordance with the mentioned sentence task experiment in van
der Lely & Fonteneau (2003) in which a semantic component (N400) was obtained
instead of syntactic components (LAN and P600) in a group of G-SLI children. They
interpreted the findings as a consequence of a deficit in the syntactic module; therefore,
the G-SLI children process sentences only semantically or, to use different terminology,
148