Prosody and gestures help pragmatic processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder

The combination of linguistic prosody and bodily signals help typically developing children (TD) in accessing pragmatic meanings. We investigated the benefits of prosodic and gestural cues for processing pragmatic meanings in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), having difficulties with structural language and pragmatics. 34 children with DLD and 45 TD controls, aged 5 to 10, participated in two visual-world eye-tracking tasks on pragmatic meanings that varied in complexity and develop in different stages: interrogative meaning (Exp. 1, less complex, developing earlier) and indirect requests (Exp. 2, more complex, developing later). In both experiments we manipulated the cues highlighting the intended meaning (prosodically-enhanced, multimodally-enhanced, and no-enhancement). The results showed that all children benefited from prosodic- and multimodal-enhancement to comprehend less complex meanings developing earlier, that younger children with DLD were less accurate even if such cues were present, and that the multimodal-enhancement was especially helpful for children with DLD when processing more complex meanings at an older age. Eye gaze data in both experiments revealed that, compared to TD children, children with DLD showed less clear preference to look at the Target image after the unfolding of bodily and prosodic cues, but that multimodal cues did reduce the children's bias to look at the literal interpretation of indirect requests. Our results highlight the importance of prosodic and bodily cues for the processing of pragmatic meanings that vary in complexity, especially when linguistic abilities are impaired, and have important implications on the communicative strategies that professionals use with children with DLD.