When
Lisa Goffman, PhD
Senior Scientist and Mary Pat Moeller Chair of Child Language
Center for Deafness, Language, and Learning
Boys Town National Research Hospital
Influences of prosodic and sound pattern sequences on learning in typical and atypical language development: In gratitude to and memory of LouAnn Gerken
Abstract: In this talk, I will review two related lines of work that were heavily influenced by and, in some cases, conducted with LouAnn Gerken. First, in my lab we drew on developmental findings from Gerken to ask questions about how language and motor factors interact as children, both typical and with developmental language disorder (DLD), produce prosodic sequences. Gerken demonstrated that young children’s errors, such as in grammatical morphology and subject pronoun omission, could be explained by prosodic factors. We showed that, in DLD, biases of the motor system also contribute to these errors. Further, prosodic deficits were observed in the production of simple musical sequences. These findings set the stage for an account of DLD in which we proposed domain general deficits in sequential pattern learning.
The second and related line follows from conversations with LouAnn, during which it became evident that the sequential deficits observed in our lab related to exciting developmental findings emerging from her work. She showed that infants are able to learn sound patterns that obligate local sequential dependencies that are no longer easily accessible to adults (Gerken et al., 2019). However, adults can learn similar patterns that do not require attention to sequential dependencies. This surprising developmental trajectory, in which infants and young children show learning skills that adults do not, also raised intriguing questions about learning in children with DLD. As we merged our two research areas, we proposed that the morphological and phonological difficulties that characterize DLD are causally linked by a broader and domain-general deficit in the ability to detect and deploy the very sequential dependencies that are readily acquired by infants and toddlers.