Costly sentences, inhibitory control, and narrative abilities: an assessment with MAIN of Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children at risk of DLD

Abstract

This study investigates whether children’s comprehension of costly syntactic structures, such as passives and relative clauses are linked to their performance in narrative tasks. It also explores possible correlations between linguistic, narrative and inhibitory control (IC) measures. Two groups of children speaking Brazilian Portuguese (BP) (mean age: 8;3) were tested: typically-developing children (TD) and children at risk of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). A standardized linguistic assessment battery for BP (MABILIN) was used together with the BP version of MAIN, and two non-verbal IC tasks adapted for children (Flanker and Go/no-go). Significant group differences were observed for most of MAIN’s measures of narrative macrostructure. Additionally, significant correlations were found between the number of correct responses in the syntactic battery and macrostructure in MAIN, particularly story structure and story comprehension. Correlations between MABILIN and the Flanker test were also obtained. These findings suggest that linguistic difficulties at the discourse level can be expected for children with DLD. Correlations between MABILIN and the Flanker test indicate that resistance to interference, a form of sustained attention, is required in the comprehension of syntactically costly sentences in a picture selection task.