Entraîner la syntaxe grâce à une approche explicite chez des enfants francophones avec TDL : Impacts sur l’acquisition de la langue maternelle et sur l’apprentissage d'une langue étrangère / First language acquisition and foreign language learning in French-speaking children with DLD: Targeting grammar through explicit intervention

Projet FNS

 

Descriptif du projet

Le trouble développemental du langage (TDL) s’applique aux enfants présentant des troubles du langage oral sans étiologie connue et s’accompagne de déficits syntaxiques sévères et persistants, particulièrement pour les phrases complexes. Des entraînements syntaxiques explicites se sont montrés efficaces chez les enfants et les adolescents anglophones avec TDL, et notamment le système SHAPE CODING qui utilise des indices visuels pour représenter les structures syntaxiques. Étonnamment, aucune étude évaluant ce système n'a inclus de participants francophones. Des difficultés syntaxiques sont également identifiées lorsque les enfants avec TDL apprennent une langue étrangère dans un cadre scolaire. Des approches explicites ont pourtant été utilisées, avec succès, dans ce contexte.  

Nous proposons d’étudier le potentiel d’un entraînement syntaxique explicite pour améliorer les capacités syntaxiques en langue maternelle et en langue étrangère de participants avec TDL. Trois études complémentaires sont proposées :

1. Création d’une tâche de répétition de phrases complexes qui sera normée et servira de base aux entraînements subséquents ; 

2. Evaluation de l’efficacité d’un entraînement syntaxique explicite et individualisé 

- 2a. en L1 (français) chez des enfants avec TDL

- 2b. en langue étrangère (anglais) chez des adolescents avec TDL

En plus de ses apports théoriques, ce projet a un impact clinique significatif car il fournira aux cliniciens/enseignants francophones de nouveaux outils valides pour l'évaluation et l'entraînement de la syntaxe complexe. Cette recherche combine l'expertise des membres de notre équipe de recherche : Dr. Hélène Delage (PI) et Dr. Emily Stanford ainsi que celle de nos partenaires : Prof. Susan Ebbels, Prof. Elena Tribushinina et Dr. Sandrine Leroy. 

 

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Project summary

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have significant language difficulties without presenting any differentiating factors, such as intellectual disability (Bishop et al., 2017). Previous research has identified severe and persistent syntactic deficits in this population for complex sentences involving syntactic movement and/or embedding (Delage & Frauenfelder, 2020; Hamann & Tuller, 2014), with cognitive-based theories explaining these deficits in terms of processing limitations. A more recent and broad-spectrum hypothesis is that of the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis (PDH), which highlights deficits in learning and in activating skills involving sequences in DLD, linked to impairments in procedural memory and weak implicit learning (Lum et al., 2014; Ullman & Pierpont, 2005). Sentence repetition tasks that accurately evaluate complex syntax in DLD have been shown to have diagnostic potential (Rujas et al., 2021), but they have not been standardized for use in clinical practice despite their conceivable therapeutic utility. Additionally, syntactic training has been found effective in English-speaking children and adolescents with DLD, with explicit approaches that teach grammar in an overt way generating the greatest effects (Ebbels, 2014). For complex syntax specifically, metalinguistic approaches, such as the SHAPE CODING (SC) system (Ebbels, 2007), use visual cues to represent syntactic structures. Surprisingly, no study evaluating this system has included French-speaking participants, even though French contains clinical markers of DLD that do not exist in English.

Syntactic difficulties are also apparent when children with DLD learn a foreign language in a scholastic setting, e.g., English as a foreign language (EFL, Paradis et al., 2017). As such, parents may be advised not to burden their child with an additional language, despite the recognized importance of English today (de Valenzuela et al., 2016). When children with DLD find themselves in EFL classrooms, language teachers, typically not trained to work with children with special language needs, are often unaware of the structures that cause difficulty for such students and are unfamiliar with appropriate tools and techniques that have been shown to facilitate learning, e.g., explicit approaches using SC or similar tools (Tribushinina et al., under review).

Building on current theoretical approaches to DLD and addressing gaps in the literature on assessment and training of complex syntax in French and EFL, we aim to investigate the potential of explicit syntactic training to improve the first language and EFL syntactic abilities of children and adolescents with DLD. Explicit and implicit training will be compared to test the PDH, which predicts that children with implicit learning difficulties will make more progress when intervention is explicit (thus allowing them to circumvent their difficulties). Prior to the different trainings, a new sentence repetition task will be created, allowing us to determine the target level of complexity for each participant’s training. Three complementary studies are proposed:

Study 1 examines the syntactic capacities of French-speaking typically-developing (TD) children and children with DLD via a novel standardized sentence repetition task in which complexity factors (syntactic movement and embedding) are manipulated. Study 2 evaluates the effectiveness of targeted and individualized syntactic training, using the SC system. Performance of trained French-speaking children with DLD will be compared to control participants following either implicit training or no training. Study 3 investigates whether SC can also be used to promote EFL learning in French-speaking adolescents with DLD.

The theoretical relevance of this work is to add to current accounts of DLD by examining if explicit syntactic training is more effective than an implicit one, in line with the PDH framework. The study is clinically significant as it will provide speech-language therapists and EFL teachers with new and valid tools in the assessment and training of complex syntax, which are currently absent from French practice.

The proposed research combines the expertise of the team members: 1) a background in developmental psycholinguistics and speech and language pathologies (Main investigator: H. Delage) and 2) the expertise of three project partners: in SC in DLD (S. Ebbels), in syntactic disorders in DLD (S. Leroy) and in EFL learners with DLD (E. Tribushinina), as well as 3) the recruitment of a native English-speaking post-doc (E. Stanford), with expertise in syntactic theory, atypical language development and EFL teaching.

 

Subside n°10001F_212974