Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

My first long-term objective is to determine how syntax (i.e. organization of words within sentences) is represented in the brain. I am particularly interested in whether dyslexic children process syntax more slowly than control children and how syntactic processing changes across typical development. My first short-term objective is to use ERPs to see whether typical adults are sensitive to changes in word order and subject-verb agreement. The second short-term goal here is to address the outstanding question of whether children with dyslexia and comorbid impaired phonological processing show syntax deficits. In one of my recent studies, dyslexic children showed more difficulty than control children processing syntax, but were generally better than SLI children. Syntactic processing was measured through behavioral tests in which children hear a sentence and give a behavioral response (e.g. sentence picture matching). This data is informative but does not offer insight into online syntactic processing. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) reflect electrical changes in the brain which are time-locked to particular events, such as spoken words, and since they have superb temporal resolution, they offer more precise information on the speed of processing than behavioral tests. I expect ERPs will reveal that dyslexic children will process syntactic information less efficiently than control children. The second major long-term goal of my program is to understand the relation between phonological and syntactic processing across development. Whether a relation exists between phonological and syntactic processing is a contentious question in the field of psycholinguistics. The words and rules theory claims that grammar is completely separate from phonological processing, whereas phonological deficit theories claim that phonological processing influences grammatical processing. My approach is to examine multiple types of phonological deficits and their impact on syntax. I propose experiments which simulate different types of phonological deficits in typically developing control children through task demands in order to determine how these affect performance on word-order and subject-verb agreement during sentence comprehension.