Multimodal Language Processing in Children With Developmental Language Disorder: The Influence of Verbal and Visuospatial Memory.

Abstract

Purpose: This study investigates how verbal and visuospatial memory capacities contribute to the processing and comprehension of pragmatic meanings that are expressed multimodally in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD).

Method: Seventy-seven children (33 with DLD, 44 typically developing [TD]), aged 5-10 years, completed standardized memory tasks and participated in a visual-world eye-tracking experiment assessing both online processing and offline comprehension of sentences with simple and complex pragmatic meanings (interrogativity and indirect requests, respectively). Sentences were presented under three conditions: baseline (no prosodic nor gestural cues to target meanings), prosodically enhanced (target meanings enhanced through prosodic cues), and multimodally enhanced (target meanings enhanced through prosodic and gestural cues).

Results: In accordance with previous findings, children with DLD showed significantly lower verbal and visuospatial memory scores than their TD peers, with more pronounced difficulties in the verbal domain. Higher verbal memory was associated with more attention to the audiovisually presented speaker during online sentence processing in general, regardless of the experimental condition or children's group. Visuospatial memory predicted children's ability to benefit from prosodic and multimodal cues in offline comprehension in both groups, particularly when interpreting pragmatically complex meanings.

Conclusion: These findings suggest that, in children both with and without DLD, verbal memory engages online attention during multimodal language processing in general, and visuospatial memory plays a bigger role in comprehending multimodal information that signals complex communicative intents.