Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

agrammatically. But the presupposition of this interpretation is that children, normally,
process sentences the same way as adults and that only the grammatical module is
affected. Our data suggest that the modularization is the final state of language
development, perhaps an evolutionary optimal way of processing language data with
limited capacities. SLI children do not reach this stage, not in the extent their peers do.
The obtained data show how conservative the hypotheses 2.2., 2.2.1 and 2.2.2. are. They
can all be confirmed since they predicted only latency shifts for relevant components.
Indeed, the latencies of the P600 were later both in ‘case-chi’ and ‘tense-chi’ experiments
in the SLI group, as predicted in the H2.2.1 and H2.2.2. The only prediction that could
not be confirmed was the later latency of LAN in ‘case-chi’ experiment due to the fact
that LAN was not obtained in this experiment neither in the TLD group nor in the SLI
group (H2.2.1.). Lack of difference between experiments was not directly predicted, but
it is exactly this similarity between results in different experiments which allow for
making a stronger claim: since SLI children lack dissociation between different aspects of
syntactic processing, they lack adult-like modularized sentence processing.
Compensatory mechanisms that can be observed on a behavioral level correspond to this
developmental trait of children with SLI. In this respect the hypothesis 2.3. stating that it
is not to be expected that children with SLI lack only one language component (but that
the deficit is more general, on a processing level) can be fully confirmed.
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