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SUMMARY:Eye tracking and syntactic processing in children with Williams Sy
 ndrome - Dr Diane Nelson (Department of Linguistics and Phonetics\, Univer
 sity of Leeds)
DTSTART:20090305T170000Z
DTEND:20090305T183000Z
UID:TALK14662@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Catherine Davies
DESCRIPTION:One of the main theoretical debates in Linguistics concerns th
 e question of modularity: to what extent does language (particularly synta
 x) develop as a cognitive domain or module separate from other cognitive a
 bilities from birth?  Williams Syndrome\, a rare hereditary disorder that 
 causes severe learning difficulties\, has been used as a source of evidenc
 e in the modularity debate. Some studies have found that WS children perfo
 rm significantly better in language tasks than expected given their other 
 cognitive abilities (Clahsen & Almazan\, 1998\; Bellugi et al 2000)\; thes
 e results have been taken as evidence for innate modularity. Other studies
  have found that WS children do not have a "verbal advantage" for their me
 ntal age\, and that their syntactic abilities are in line with their other
  cognitive abilities (Karmiloff-Smith et al. 1997\, Stojanovik et al. 2004
 ). According to the Neuro-constructivist view (Karmiloff-Smith 1998)\, the
  genetic abnormality which causes Williams Syndrome affects the developmen
 tal pathway for each cognitive skill. This predicts that while children wi
 th Williams Syndrome may sometimes score relatively well in language tasks
 \, they still may acquire and process language in a different way from typ
 ically developing children. \n\nWhat is the best way to evaluate these com
 peting theories? Previous studies looking at the syntactic abilities of ch
 ildren have used traditional "off-line" tasks\, which have been found to o
 verestimate language deficits and don't reveal information about on-line s
 yntactic processing. Eye tracking\, a relatively new technology\, allows d
 irect observation of how people process language by monitoring their eye-m
 ovements as they view a visual scene while listening to a sentence. Eye tr
 acking while listening has been used to investigate syntactic processing o
 f wh-extracted sentences in adults with Broca's aphasia\, with unexpected 
 results (Dickie et al 2007). We have adapted this experimental design in a
  pilot experiment using a Tobii (non-head mounted) eye tracker. Our result
 s\, both for off-line and on-line tasks\, feed into the modularity questio
 n and also allow us to evaluate eye tracking as a useful methodology for i
 nvestigating language abilities in WS children.\n
LOCATION:GR06-7\, English Faculty\, 9 West Road (Sidgwick Site)
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