Visual attention and phonological processing in children with developmental language disorder

Lara-Díaz, María Fernanda; Rojas, Judy Costanza Beltrán; Rippe, Yennifer Aponte · 2024 · DOAJ

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2024.1386279

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Summary

This study investigates the relationship between visual attention and phonological processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). While DLD is primarily characterized by linguistic deficits, recent evidence suggests broader non-linguistic cognitive impairments, including in visual attention. The research aims to characterize how children with DLD allocate visual attention during phonological processing tasks, specifically examining their sensitivity to phonological distractors compared to typically developing peers. This inquiry is motivated by the high comorbidity between DLD and dyslexia and the hypothesis that general domain deficits in processing speed and attention may underlie linguistic difficulties. The researchers employed a cross-sectional experimental design involving 40 Colombian Spanish-speaking children aged 4–8: 20 with DLD and 20 matched controls. Participants underwent assessments of language, vocabulary, and phonological awareness using standardized tests (CELF, TVIP, PROFON). The core experimental task utilized eye-tracking technology (Tobii TX300) to measure visual attention during auditory word recognition. Children viewed images of target words alongside distractors that were either phonologically unrelated (baseline), rhyming, or sharing the same initial syllable (cohort). The eye tracker recorded fixation latency, duration, and count to determine how distractors influenced the identification of target words. Results indicated that children with DLD performed significantly worse than controls on traditional measures of language, vocabulary, and phonological awareness. In the eye-tracking task, both groups showed similar performance on baseline trials, indicating equivalent ability to identify isolated words. However, distinct patterns emerged with distractors. Control children exhibited interference effects from both cohort and rhyme distractors, showing longer fixation latencies. In contrast, children with DLD showed interference only from cohort distractors, not rhyme distractors. Heat maps revealed that control children distributed fixations across both target and distractor images, whereas children with DLD focused primarily on the cohort distractor, suggesting a prioritization of segmental (initial sound) information over suprasegmental (rhyme) properties. The findings suggest that children with DLD have reduced sensitivity to phonological relations such as rhyme during online processing, despite performing similarly to controls on initial sound identification tasks. The authors conclude that traditional offline assessments may mask subtle processing deficits detectable via eye-tracking. The study highlights the importance of assessing online processing abilities and visual attention in DLD, suggesting that clinical evaluations should consider how non-linguistic cognitive factors, such as visual attention, influence linguistic performance. These results support the view that DLD involves general domain limitations affecting the integration of visual and phonological information.

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