Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

On the basis of the test results 6 SLI children of age 9 to 11 were selected (5 boys 1 girl,
average age 9;11). However, EEG data from two children (two boys) had to be rejected
due to the artifacts and noise. The number of children was thus reduced to four (three
boys and one girl). The girl has difficulties mostly in the area of morphology and
semantics. Two boys achieved lower scores on the phonological tests. In one case the
language and speech pathologist reported phonological difficulties affected strongly other
aspects of language (i.e. although the overall results were low, the core of the impairment
was phonological). Finally, one boy has lexical-semantic impairment.
c. The third group comprises of the children with typical language development (TLD
children, N=9). It consists of children who match to SLI children in age (three boys six
girls; average age = 10, SD=1,2).
d. Finally, the fourth group of participants was a group of adults (N=10) included in the
experiments aimed at collecting data from TLD and SLI children, as a control (since the
experiments were slightly changed in order to make them more suitable for children, as
explained in the next paragraph). This group different from the first group of participants
(adults) and took part only in the experiments with children. The group consists of
psychology and language & speech pathology students of the 3 rd and 4 th grade (three
males, seven females; average age 22). Permission for the study was obtained from the
Ethical Board and all participants gave a written informed consent. The informed consent
for children was signed by their parents.
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