Decreased sensitivity to long-distance dependencies in children with a history of specific language impairment: electrophysiological evidence.

Purpose One possible source of tense and agreement limitations in children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a weakness in appreciating structural dependencies that occur in many sentences in the input. This possibility was tested in the present study. Method Children with a history of SLI (H-SLI; n = 12; M = 9;7 [years;months]) and typically developing same-age peers (TD; n = 12; M = 9;7) listened to and made grammaticality judgments about grammatical and ungrammatical sentences involving either a local agreement error (e.g., “Every night they talks on the phone”) or a long-distance finiteness error (e.g., “He makes the quiet boy talks a little louder”). Electrophysiological (ERP) and behavioral (accuracy) measures were obtained. Results Local agreement errors elicited the expected anterior negativity and P600 components in both groups of children. However, relative to the TD group, the P600 effect for the long-distance finiteness errors was delayed, reduced in amplitude, and shorter in duration...