How Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder Use Prosody and Gestures to Process Phrasal Ambiguities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

It is a very interesting and relevant study, as it delves into the importance of the prosodic component in language comprehension. The use of the Eye Tracking methodology enables highly insightful comparisons with the real-time comprehension variable. It is recommended to include the effect of participants' L1. The implications for DLD, as well as the influence of age on these processes, could be further discussed. Additionally, it is suggested to review the citation format when the author's name appears in the text.

The study is very interesting as it addresses how children with DLD use prosodic and gestural cues to interpret phrasal ambiguities. The findings indicate that children with DLD rely on prosodic cues to comprehend sentences through multimodal integration in linguistic interactions.

The findings are very important both for understanding DLD and for approaching the cognitive and linguistic mechanisms underlying the process of language comprehension. Additionally, this has clinical implications as it provides evidence for methods and approaches to intervention and rehabilitation.

The study finds that in DLD, prosodic cues are used in sentence comprehension, highlighting the understanding of the disorder's nature.

It is a very original work as there are few studies on prosody in DLD, especially considering it focuses on a Romance language like Catalan, whose accentual pattern is distinct.

The conclusions are derived from experimentally obtained data and are appropriately contrasted with the arguments presented in the introduction.

The results and conclusions adequately address the research question. The references are appropriate, as are the tables and figures.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper investigates how children with DLD and TD who speak Catalan use prosody and gestures to process a phrasal ambiguity. The phrasal ambiguity arises due to different attachments of an adjective, with low attachment being the default interpretation. The offline results indicate that prosody-only and multimodal conditions have the same effect, interpreted as gestures providing no benefit beyond prosody. Gaze preferences showed that the multimodal condition resulted in an increase in looks toward the target image associated with high attachment, except for the older TD children.  

            The experimental design seems reasonable, and the paper's topic could be of great interest to the journal's audience. However, I have some questions that need to be addressed before publication.  

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The study of multimodal cues in speech comprehension, with a focus on children with developmental language disorder (DLD), is an important and not well understood area of research, with strong theoretical and clinical implications. Thus, this topic area is of great interest.

This is a very well written paper with a thorough and sound review of the literature. I do  suggest the inclusion of some newer references. For example, the DLD citations about sentence comprehension deficits are very old; it is great to cite classic papers, but there is much newer work, for example from James Montgomery and colleagues. Overall, citations would benefit from updating, with newer work included as well.

This is a well powered study for this clinical population, with children carefully identified. I did wonder whether other potentially co-occurring developmental factors, such as speech sound disorder, hearing impairment, or autism, were assessed via parent report? I appreciated the description of bilingual and multilingual language experience.

The stimuli were cleverly and carefully designed to assure a bias to a particular interpretation to afford a test of how added cues could potentially modify this bias.

How was the speaker trained to produce a manual beat gesture and head nod? How was the alignment with the nuclear pitch verified?

It was good that the pictures were in black and white. But were any other measures of preference obtained?

Were the children familiarized with the vocabulary used in the stimuli? Were the content words controlled for age of acquisition, familiarity? This may be especially relevant for the children with DLD. It is stated in the Discussion that stimuli were “designed to minimize lexical and syntactic complexity”; it was unclear how this was done.

Behavioral results showed that both prosodic and multimodal (gestural) cues facilitated comprehension of phrasally ambigious sentences and did so similarly. However, eye tracking findings showed that multimodal cues did result in children looking more at the target, but only after the talker had completed the sentence. During the input phase, the gestures and the face drew the child’s attention, but this did not inhibit accurate processing. This role of attention was an interesting and unexpected finding, one that would merit more attention in future work. It is exciting when unexpected findings open new avenues to explore.

Important results were that even 5 year old children could use prosodic cues to resolve ambiguities. Further, children with DLD benefitted from prosodic cues and showed comprehension of phrasal structure and did so as much as their TD peers. The multi-modal condition was especially facilitative.

When discussing the results, it is important to not make a large assumption about phonology, or even prosody, not being impaired in DLD. There is much work in the production domain that word form learning and prosodic production may be affected. That said, it is important and interesting the prosodic cues facilitate comprehension. It would strengthen the paper to develop why; does prosody facilitate organization into groupings? A little more interpretation of this very interesting result would be beneficial.

Typographical error on line 580, pg. 15. Should read “multimodal cues to interpret...”

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf