Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

The two experiments performed on a group of children with TLD and children with SLI
are hardly sufficient to make new discoveries about the nature of SLI. The absence of
LAN in the TLD group and a right hemisphere negative deflection with a shift in latency
are consistent with the Bishop’s (2000) view on ‘how brain learns language’. According
to this view, language development does not consist only of growth, but also on the
refinement and reorganization processes. She uses a bush as a metaphor: its cultivation in
a garden does not consist only of watering, but also of trimming. The bush metaphor is
even more convincing when compared with the anatomical facts about brain development
in infancy and childhood, in particular with the observed decrease in the number of
synapses, a decrease which lasts until the end of puberty (Judaš & Kostović, 1997, Benes,
1999). Therefore, it can be concluded that between the age of 9 and 11 years process of
language acquisition is not finished and that children process sentences in an inefficient
way due to the differences in brain organization, as suggested by Dorothy Bishop.
Similar arguments were offered in the previous paragraph.
Persistence in the inefficient language processing in the SLI group can be inferred from
the comparison of two results obtained in this study. First, electrophysiological results
show overall lower effects on all experiments, i.e. the difference between conditions are
smaller or even non-existent. This means that the children with SLI failed to recognize
the errors in the stimulus sentences in the violation condition. The difference actually
consisted of a single morpheme (Dative ~ Accusative, Infinitive ~ Participle) and the
morpheme is usually only one phoneme (in fact, only infinitive ending consisted of two
phonemes, -ti). The difference between the experimental conditions was thus, in
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