Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

to the different processing of syntactic information in adults and children between 9 and
11. The differences – absence of LAN in case violation, shift in latency for P600 and
different (broader) distribution of the late negative wave (N400’) when tense of a
sentence is violated – can be explained by inefficient language processing of children
when developmental processes are still not finished. Maturational processes consist of
modularization that corresponds to the strong dissociation between constituent and
operator projection processes.
Finally, differences between children with TLD and children with SLI were found. The
most prominent difference is a weak electrophysiological effect or absence of difference
between experimental conditions and even between experiments. This means, first, that
children with SLI at least partly fail to detect grammatical errors and, consequently,
achieve sentence comprehension using alternative strategies (perhaps what is usually
called ‘agrammatical comprehension’). Second, the differences are explained in terms of
impaired, inefficient, limited or slow processing (which is a consequence of slower
development), not as a lack of linguistic knowledge. Third, if development is a process
that ends in modularization, SLI children definitely lag behind their peers and probably
never reach the adult stage developing compensatory strategies instead.
It should be noted that electrophysiological research related to language comprehension
is relatively new in Croatian and that the data collected for this study is practically the
only usable data for the analysis and discussion of sentence comprehension processes.
Therefore, a lot of caution is needed when generalizing from, in fact, a very limited
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