assignment in portuguese language

Portuguese translation of 'assignment'

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Translation of "assignment" into Portuguese

atribuição, tarefa, cessão are the top translations of "assignment" into Portuguese. Sample translated sentence: The assignment is due two weeks from today. ↔ A tarefa é para daqui a duas semanas.

the act of assigning, or an assigned task [..]

English-Portuguese dictionary

operation that assigns a value to a variable [..]

The assignment of responsibilities will depend on the structure of the national administrations involved.

A atribuição de responsabilidades dependerá da estrutura das administrações nacionais envolvidas.

task given to students [..]

The assignment is due two weeks from today.

A tarefa é para daqui a duas semanas.

document that effects this transfer

It also includes operations to liquidate or assign assets built up.

Abrange igualmente as operações de liquidação ou de cessão dos activos constituídos.

Less frequent translations

• distribuição
• incumbência
• autorização
• trabalho de casa
• transferência

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Automatic translations of " assignment " into Portuguese

Phrases similar to "assignment" with translations into portuguese.

• augmented assignment Atribuição ampliada
• assignment of profits anticrese
• assigned management point ponto de gerenciamento atribuído
• assignment statement Atribuição (computação) · declaração de atribuição · instrução de atribuição
• assignment action ação de atribuição
• publish assignments
• random assignment
• assigned afecto · afeto · assignat · assinalado · atribuido · delegado · lotado

Translations of "assignment" into Portuguese in sentences, translation memory

Translation of "assignment" to Portuguese

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Dictionary translations for "assignment"

Phrases with "assignment" (6)

• assignment of damage claim - cessão de reclamações por danos
• assignment agreement - acordo de cessão
• assignment operator - atribuição de operador
• assignment statement - instrução de afectação
• deed of assignment - acordo de transferência
• pin assignment - atribuição de um número de identificação

Contexts with "assignment"

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What is the translation of "assignments" in Portuguese?

"assignments" in portuguese, assignments {pl}.

• volume_up tarefas

assignation {noun}

• volume_up encontro amoroso
• encontro marcado

assigned {adj.}

• volume_up delegado

assignable {adj.}

• volume_up transferível
• transmissível

assignment {noun}

• volume_up missão
• autorização
• transferência escrita

Translations

Assignments {plural}.

• open_in_new Link to source
• warning Request revision

assigned {adjective}

Assignable {adjective}, context sentences, english portuguese contextual examples of "assignments" in portuguese.

These sentences come from external sources and may not be accurate. bab.la is not responsible for their content.

Monolingual examples

English how to use "assignments" in a sentence, english how to use "assignation" in a sentence, english how to use "assigned" in a sentence, english how to use "assignable" in a sentence, english how to use "assignment" in a sentence, english how to use "tarefas" in a sentence, english how to use "encontro amoroso" in a sentence, english how to use "encontro marcado" in a sentence, english how to use "transferível" in a sentence, english how to use "atribuível" in a sentence, collocations, "committee assignments" in portuguese.

• volume_up atribuições de comitê
• volume_up atribuições do comitê

"course assignments" in Portuguese

• volume_up atribuições do curso

"dangerous assignments" in Portuguese

• volume_up atribuições perigosas

Synonyms (English) for "assignation":

• apportioning
• apportionment
• transferable
• transferrable
• appointment
• designation
• duty assignment
• assigned to
• assigned value
• assigned work
• assignment editors
• assignment include
• assignment involve
• assignment reporter
• assignment require
• assignments
• assimilable
• assimilate the information
• assimilate the knowledge
• assimilated
• assimilation
• assist a client

Search for more words in the English-Danish dictionary .

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50+ Portuguese Classroom Phrases for Studying in Brazil

Learning is a lifetime pursuit. So if you are embarking on an educational experience in Brazil, there are some Portuguese classroom phrases you should learn. This way, you will be able to follow your teacher’s instructions, greet your colleagues and make the most of the experience!

Whether you plan to spend a semester abroad or you are going to teach in Brazil, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with some of the specific vocabularies. Once you find the most common Portuguese phrases and words used in the classroom, you can focus on the most important thing: learning! 

In this article, we will cover vocabulary for the supplies you will need, classroom items, and subject names. You will also learn sentences and phrases to follow your teacher’s instructions and ask for clarifications. Finally, you’ll see how to explain tardiness and absences, and how to talk about your favorite courses. 

Ready to learn Portuguese phrases for the classroom? Let’s get started!

Grab a pen and some paper and get ready to take notes!

• Classroom Greetings
• Teacher Instructions in Portuguese
• Ask Questions in Portuguese
• Explain Absence and Tardiness in Portuguese
• Talking About Your Favorite Subjects in Portuguese
• School Supplies and Classroom Vocabulary in Portuguese
• Continue Learning More Portuguese with PortuguesePod101

1. Classroom Greetings

When you arrive at your educational institution or classroom, ready to learn the Portuguese language, the first thing you will have to do is greet people. Whether you’re saying hi to your friends and colleagues or saying good morning to your teacher and professors, there are a few phrases you need to learn.

But first, here is some important context and vocabulary. In Portuguese, we use the same words for teacher and professor: professor (male) and professora (female). When addressing a teacher or professor, you can use the word professor(a) by itself or include the professor’s name afterward. In Brazil, we usually use the professor’s first name. 

You should know that, in general, the relationship between professors and students in Brazil tends to be more informal than in other countries. So don’t be surprised if you hear people calling professors directly by their name or using você (“you”). A more polite way to address teachers and professors is to use the form o senhor (“the sir”) or a senhora (“the madam”). 

Now, let’s see how to greet people in the classroom. 

• Bom dia, professor. (“Good morning, teacher.”)
• Oi professor, tudo bem? (“Hi teacher, how are you?”)
• Boa tarde, turma. (“Good afternoon, class.”)
• Estão dispensados. Tenham um bom fim de semana. (“You are dismissed. Have a good weekend.”)
• Até amanhã. (“See you tomorrow.”)
• Até semana que vem. (“See you next week.”)

2. Teacher Instructions in Portuguese

Class just began. You are listening attentively to your teacher, but suddenly they ask you a question. You better know what they are saying to avoid any confused stares. Who knows, you might even be able to help your colleagues if they are having trouble understanding!

Or perhaps, you are planning to teach in Brazil for some time. In this case, here are some must-know classroom phrases for teachers in basic Portuguese:

• Silêncio, por favor. (“Silence, please.”)
• Sentem-se, por favor. (“Sit down, please.”)
• Os alunos lá atrás conseguem me ouvir? (“Can the students in the back hear me?”)
• Isto é importante, então prestem atenção.   (“This is important, so pay attention.”)
• Hoje vamos estudar tempos verbais. (“Today we are going to study verb tenses.”)
• Abram o livro na página 394. (“Open the book on page 394.”)
• Peguem seus cadernos. (“Get your notebooks.”)
• Alguém sabe me dizer porque esta resposta está errada? (“Can anyone tell me why this answer is wrong?”) 
• O que isso quer dizer? (“What does that mean?”)
• Quem sabe responder esta questão? (“Who can answer this question?”)
• Repitam comigo. (“Say it with me.”)
• Escrevam, por favor. (“Write it down, please.”)
• Alguma dúvida? Está claro? (“Any questions? Is it clear?”)
• Para este exercício, podem trabalhar em pares ou grupos de três estudantes. (“For this exercise, you can work in pairs or groups of three students.”)
• Formem grupos de cinco pessoas. (“Form groups of five people.”)

Quem sabe responder esta pergunta? (“Who knows how to answer this question?”)

3. Ask Questions in Portuguese

It’s absolutely normal that, when following a class, some things are not immediately clear. You may not understand something the professor said, or maybe you are confused about some of the course material. Either way, knowing how to ask questions and clarifications is an important step for a better Portuguese language learning experience.

• O que o professor disse? (“What did the teacher say?”)
• Desculpe, não entendi. Pode repetir? (“Sorry, I do not understand. Can you repeat it?”)
• Pode explicar mais uma vez? (“Can you explain it one more time?”)
• Pode falar um pouco mais devagar, por favor? (“Can you speak a little slower, please?”)
• O que significa isso? (“What does that mean?”)
• Como posso dizer isto em português? (“How can I say this in Portuguese?”)
• Eu tenho uma dúvida: como posso…? (“I have a question: how can I…?”)
• Eu não sei como dizer isto. (“I don’t know how to say this.”)
• Com licença, professor. Posso ir ao banheiro? (“Excuse me, teacher. Can I go to the bathroom?”)

4. Explain Absence and Tardiness in Portuguese

Let’s face it. Stuff happens – maybe you weren’t able to finish an assignment by the deadline. Or maybe you went out with friends and missed your alarm clock in the morning. It’s a good idea to know how to apologize… or make up excuses. 

The infamous phrase “My dog ate my homework” can be translated to Portuguese as Meu cachorro comeu meu dever de casa . Everyone will know what it means if you say it, even though it is originally an anglophone sentence. 

Need a more believable excuse for being late? Public transportation can be quite flaky in Brazil. Say your bus was late , and you might successfully explain your tardiness without problems. 

Here are possible ways to justify absence or delay. 

• Desculpa, professor, mas eu não consegui terminar o trabalho. (“Sorry, professor, but I couldn’t finish the assignment.”)
• Eu não fiz o dever de casa. (“I did not do my homework.”)
• Eu não consegui terminar a lição de casa. (“I did not do my homework.”)
• Desculpe o atraso, o ônibus atrasou. (“Sorry for the delay, the bus was late.”)
• Eu estou um pouco mal, não vou para a aula hoje. (“I’m a little sick, I’m not going to class today.”)
• Não me sinto muito bem. Posso ser dispensado hoje? (“I don’t feel well. Can I be excused for the day?”)
• Estou doente, então vou faltar à escola hoje. Mas eu tenho um atestado médico. (“I’m sick, so I’m going to miss school today. But I have a doctor’s sick note.”)

Public transportation will never be this empty in Brazil. But you may still have a chance to read!

5. Talking About Your Favorite Subjects in Portuguese

We hope you enjoy some of the courses and subjects you study. That’s the key to enjoy studying! 

The first step to talking about the subjects you enjoy – and the ones you don’t enjoy as much – is to know their names in Portuguese. 

And here are some basic Portuguese phrases and conversations discussing subjects:

• O professor de Matemática está atrasado. (“The Mathematics teacher is late.”)
• Estou indo para a aula de Espanhol. (“I’m going to Spanish class.”)
• Qual é a sua matéria preferida? (“What is your favorite subject?”)
• Minha matéria favorita é Filosofia. (“My favorite subject is Philosophy.”)
• Eu tenho boas notas em Inglês. (“I have good grades in English.”)
• Eu sou péssimo(a) em Física. (“I’m very bad at Physics.”)
• Tenho que revisar a matéria da aula de História. (“I have to review the material for History class.”)
• Você precisa de ajuda para estudar? Eu sou boa em História. (“Do you need help studying? I’m good at History.”)
• Ah sim, por favor. E eu posso te ajudar com Inglês, se você quiser. (“Oh yes, please. And I can help you with English if you want.”)
• Amanhã é a prova de Química. (“The Chemistry test is tomorrow.”)

You better like biology if you want to be a doctor.

6. School Supplies and Classroom Vocabulary in Portuguese

You know that moment when you are sitting at your desk, watching the professor write on the black board, you pull up your notebook from your backpack… And then you see that you forgot your pencil case. Now you need to ask your colleagues for a pen. 

All of those Portuguese words in the sentence above are important classroom vocabulary to know. After that, you can borrow and lend things to your colleagues, point out items in the classroom and more.   

Let’s start with a list of supplies: 

Now, for the classroom vocabulary:

Finally, here are a few more Portuguese classroom phrases for students:

• Eu esqueci meu livro. Posso sentar com você? (“I forgot my book. Can I sit with you?”)
• Eu perdi meu estojo. Você pode me emprestar um lápis? (“I lost my pencil case. Can you lend me a pencil?”) 
• Claro! Mas é bom apontar esse lápis antes de usar. Aqui, pode usar meu apontador. (“Of course! But it ‘s better to sharpen that pencil before using it. Here, you can use my sharpener.”)
• Você tem uma caneta para me emprestar? (“Do you have a pen I can borrow?”)
• Todos trouxeram réguas e calculadoras para a prova? (“Did everyone bring rulers and calculators to the test?”)
• Professor, minha calculadora não está funcionando. Alguém tem uma calculadora extra para emprestar? (“Professor, my calculator is not working. Does anyone have an extra calculator to lend me?”)

O mapa-múndi (“The world map”)

7. Continue Learning More Portuguese with PortuguesePod101

With this guide, you are now ready to boost your Portuguese language learning, get into a classroom in Brazil and understand all of the Portuguese classroom words and phrases! Learning can be an exciting journey. And now you’re even more prepared for it. Next step: bonding with colleagues and interacting with professors – in Portuguese of course! Luckily, there are plenty of resources on PortuguesePod101 to help you with that.

What did you think of this guide? Do you feel prepared to follow your teacher’s instructions or ask questions to your colleagues? Let us know in the comments below.

Now, continue learning Portuguese with the hundreds of free Portuguese resources and the many vocabulary lists available on PortuguesePod101.com. Go ahead and choose your favorite tools to expand your learning opportunities.

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Assignment meaning in Portuguese

Assignment meaning in Portuguese. Here you learn English to Portuguese translation / English to Portuguese dictionary of the word ' Assignment ' and also play quiz in Portuguese words starting with A also play A-Z dictionary quiz . To learn Portuguese language , common vocabulary and grammar are the important sections. Common Vocabulary contains common words that we can used in daily life. This way to learn Portuguese language quickly and learn daily use sentences helps to improve your Portuguese language. If you think too hard to learn Portuguese language, 1000 words will helps to learn Portuguese language easily, they contain 2-letter words to 13-letter words. Below you see how to say Assignment in Portuguese.

How to say 'Assignment' in Portuguese

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Syntactic Structural Assignment in Brazilian Portuguese-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

Talita fortunato-tavares.

a The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Claudia R. F. de Andrade

b Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

Debora M. Befi-Lopes

Arild hestvik.

c University of Delaware, Newark

Baila Epstein

4 Brooklyn College, City University of New York

Lidiya Tornyova

Richard g. schwartz.

In this study, the authors examined the comprehension of sentences with predicates and reflexives that are linked to a nonadjacent noun as a test of the hierarchical ordering deficit (HOD) hypothesis. That hypothesis and more modern versions posit that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty in establishing nonadjacent (hierarchical) relations among elements of a sentence. The authors also tested whether additional working memory demands in constructions containing reflexives affected the extent to which children with SLI incorrectly structure sentences as indicated by their picture-pointing comprehension responses.

Sixteen Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children (8;4–l 0;6 [years;months]) with SLI and 16 children with typical language development (TLD) matched for age (±3 months), gender, and socioeconomic status participated in 2 experiments (predicate and reflexive interpretation). In the reflexive experiment, the authors also manipulated working memory demands. Each experiment involved a 4-choice picture selection sentence comprehension task.

Children with SLI were significantly less accurate on all conditions. Both groups made more hierarchical syntactic construction errors in the long working memory condition than in the short working memory condition.

The HOD hypothesis was not confirmed. For both groups, syntactic factors (structural assignment) were more vulnerable than lexical factors (prepositions) to working memory effects in sentence miscomprehension.

One characteristic of specific language impairment (SLI) is a deficit in the comprehension and production of sentences, particularly those that involve long-distance relationships. Several proposals have focused on the computational grammatical complexity (CGC) hypothesis, which posits deficits in the computational grammatical system that effect hierarchically complex structures in one or more components (syntax, morphology, phonology) of language ( Gallon, Harris, & van der Lely, 2007 ; Marinis & van der Lely, 2007 ; Marshall & van der Lely, 2006 ; van der Lely, 2005 ; van der Lely & Stollwerck, 1997 ).

The hierarchical ordering deficit(HOD)account ( Cromer, 1978 ), an historical predecessor of CGC, suggests that children with language impairment do not assign structure to sentences in the same way as their typically developing peers. According to this account, children with language impairment represent sentences as flat instead of hierarchically organized structures, and the absence of hierarchical relations within the sentence structure would account for their overall difficulties with sentence comprehension. The HOD account concerns children with language disorders, but because the discussion and definition of SLI had not yet emerged by the late 1970s, this hypothesis has not been directly studied in children with SLI.

Bishop (1982) examined the HOD hypothesis in children with Landau-Kleffner syndrome who may exhibit some similar language deficits to children with SLI ( Billard, Fluss, & Pinton, 2009 ; Deonna & Roulet-Perez, 2005 ; Overvliet et al., 2010 ). In that study, Bishop tested the relation between a predicate and the syntactic position of the nominal to which the predicate applies (attachment). An offline sentence comprehension task was used, in which children heard a sentence and then pointed to a picture in an array of four. Ten sentences with the following structure were devised: The X in/ on / under / in front of / behind the Z is Y , where X and Z were nouns and Y was a color term. For each sentence, the corresponding of four pictures were as follows: correct picture (C); sequential error where X and Y are reversed (S); prepositional error, corresponding to a sentence with a different preposition (P); and hierarchical error, corresponding to the type of error where the complement applies to Z rather than X (H). The actual group and individual scores were never presented. Instead, Bishop classified the children as C-, S-, P-, or H-responders according to the most frequent type of response given to the 10 sentences. Children who did not show a preference for selecting one type of picture were classified as mixed . More children with Landau-Kleffner syndrome were classified as having a hierarchical error preference than for any other response. In contrast, children with typical language development (TLD) did not show a particular preference for one type of distractor. Although Bishop concluded that these findings supported the HOD hypothesis as a cause for the deficit in comprehending sentences with hierarchical long-distance dependencies, the small number of stimuli and the unusual data analyses render the conclusion uncertain.

In several studies, researchers have investigated the ability of children with SLI to comprehend and produce sentences with long-distance dependencies. Although there seems to be an agreement that children with SLI do have an overall difficulty with a variety of syntactic structures such as relative clauses ( Friedmann & Novogrodsky, 2004 , 2007 ; Hestvik, Schwartz & Tornyova, 2010 : Schuele & Tolbert. 2001 ) and wh -questions ( Deevy & Leonard, 2004 ; Hansson & Nettelbladt, 2006 ; Marinis & van der Lely, 2007 ), the overall source of these difficulties is not yet clear. Among the candidate deficits that might explain these difficulties are specific grammatical deficits (e.g., Cromer, 1978 ; van der Lely, 2005 ; van der Lely & Stollwerck, 1997 ) and working memory processing limitations (e.g., Deevy & Leonard, 2004 ; Hestvik et al., 2010 ; Marton, Schwartz, Farkas, & Katsnelson, 2006 ). In the present study, we examined the HOD hypothesis and the effects of working memory demands on syntactic structural assignment of children with SLI and their chronologically matched controls.

Syntactic Aspects of the HOD Hypothesis

The HOD hypothesis ( Cromer, 1978 ) is based on the dependency among elements of a syntactic arrangement. When two or more elements co-occur in a syntactic arrangement, some type of dominance exists between or among them. Typically, there is one dominant element, the head , which is the primary determinant of the properties of the arrangement. The other elements are its dependent(s) ( Van Valin, 2001 ). C-command (deriving from constituent command ) is a relationship between phrasal nodes (elements of syntactic structure) in grammatical trees. Originally defined by Reinhardt (1976) , it corresponds to the idea of siblings and all their descendants in a hierarchical relationship.

To illustrate, when a sentence such as The chicken on the ball is brown is heard, a hierarchical representation (see Figure 1A ) of the sentence is incrementally built as each word is processed. However, suppose that children with SLI fail to build the correct syntactic structure during online sentence processing. The same sentence would then be represented as a sequence of units in a flat structure (see Figure 1B ), and the absence of hierarchical relations results in an indeterminate attachment. It also leads to an absence of structural differentiation information among the elements of the syntactic tree resulting in comprehension errors with discourse consequences.

A: Hierarchical structure representation of the sentence with predicate attachment The chicken on the ball is brown . B: Incorrect ( flat ) structure representation of the sentence The chicken on the ball is brown .

In Figure 1A , the subject noun phrase (NP; the chicken ) is positioned higher in the tree than the predicate (brown ). Therefore, the interpretation of this hierarchically built structure would be that the chicken is on the ball, and the chicken is brown because the subject ( the chicken ) c-commands the predicate ( brown ). In Figure 1B , this differentiation is not present and is not expressed by the structure. This lack of hierarchical structure results in ambiguity; the predicate ( brown ) could be attached either to the nearest NP ( the ball ) or to the furthest NP ( the chicken ). In case a recency strategy is employed, the predicate ( brown ) is applied to the nearest NP ( the ball ). In the latter, the interpretation of this flat structure would be that the chicken is on the ball, and the ball is brown; in other words, the chicken is not higher than brown in this incorrect syntactic structure.

The supposed incorrect structure assignment proposed by Cromer (1978) should have the same effects on predication relationships and on reflexive interpretation. Reflexive interpretation, similar to predication, relies on structure assignment because a reflexive pronoun must agree with the antecedent that c-commands it in person, gender, and number. C-command essentially means that the antecedent must be asymmetrically higher in the tree representation than the reflexive. For example, in the following syntactic representation (see Figure 2A ), the reflexive pronoun can refer only to the grandma , not the mom . The reason for this is that the NP the grandma is the head of the subject. Only the grandma c-commands the reflexive; thus, only this NP can provide reference for the reflexive. If SLI children do not correctly represent these structural relations (as in Figure 2B ), their rules for reflexive interpretation would not apply correctly, and they might allow the mom to be the antecedent of the reflexive, yielding the following interpretation: The grandma is behind the mom, and the mom is looking at herself .

A: Hierarchical structure representation of the sentence with a reflexive dependency The grandma behind the mom is looking at herself . B: Incorrect ( flat ) structure representation of the sentence The grandma behind the mom is looking at herself .

Syntactic Structural Assignment and Reflexives

The authors of several studies have examined whether deficits in the syntactic structural assignment affect reflexive–antecedent relations in the SLI population using the Syntactic Test of Pronominal Reference (STOP; e.g., van der Lely, 1998 ; van der Lely & Stollwerck, 1997 ). The STOP analyzes syntactic assignment of pronouns and reflexives in the following relations: name–pronoun, quantifier–pronoun, name– reflexive, and quantifier–reflexive. The test consists of 108 sentences: 48 experimental sentences and 60 fillers. Each sentence is presented twice. In one presentation, the picture matched the target sentence; in the other presentation, the picture did not match the target sentence. In a study using the STOP ( van der Lely & Stollwerck, 1997 ), 12 children ages 9;3–12;10 (years;months) with grammatical SLI were near ceiling on the name–reflexive conditions in which semantic–conceptual lexical knowledge was sufficient to identify the correct antecedent. In contrast, children with SLI had significantly lower accuracy scores than did their language-matched controls (ages 5;5 to 8;9) in mismatch conditions with lexical information that was insufficient to determine the antecedent, and the children had to rely only on syntax. In a subsequent study, van der Lely (1998) reported similar findings on a case study of a boy with SLI, but much less details of findings were provided. On these two studies, the authors concluded that children with SLI have sufficient knowledge of the semantic–conceptual properties of reflexives and theta-role assignment, but they do not have the syntactic knowledge characterized by the binding theory.

However, some facts about these studies should be noted. The test included syntactic constructions with subordinate clauses and question structures, which might have added greater complexity to the reflexives. Furthermore. we used a limited number of different sentences per condition (only six, as each sentence was presented twice). Children with SLI were up to 5.5 SDs below the mean on standardized tests—an atypical study group—which also resulted in a very young group of language-matched controls. Moreover, van der Lely and Stollwerck (1997) observed no between-group differences on the match condition in which children had to rely only on syntax. Processing limitations such as working memory deficits may also play a significant role on the construction of hierarchical syntactic structures, and none of these studies had taken that into account. The role of structured syntactic assignment and the influence of working memory on sentence comprehension of children with SLI still remain unclear.

Working Memory and Sentence Comprehension

Although domain-specific perspectives of SLI, such as the CGC account, predict a pervasive deficit in grammatical components determined by structural complexity, they reject the influence of working memory. Working memory is critical for processing language because the building of syntactic and discourse structures requires relating linguistic units across a number of intervening words and syllables in a lengthy time span ( Martin & McElree, 2009 ; Marton et al., 2006 ; McElree, Foraker, & Dyer, 2003 ).

Most investigations of the relation between working memory and sentence comprehension have analyzed the correlation between independent working memory measures (e.g., nonword and real-word repetition, repetition of word lists, etc.) and performance on a sentence comprehension task. For example, Just and Carpenter (1992) used a sentence list recall task to classify subjects as having high or low sentence memory spans and then found that their memory span was related to their performance on an independent comprehension task. In contrast, Waters and Caplan (1996) found that sentence list recall span was not a major determinant in the processing of garden-path sentences. This latter finding led to a proposal of multiple working memory capacities that subserve language processing and to the suggestion that the sentence span task does not assess the working memory used for language comprehension in adults.

In several studies, Montgomery and colleagues examined the influence of working memory on sentence comprehension by children with SLI. An early study ( Montgomery, 1995 ) provided evidence of a relation between phonological working memory deficits and sentence comprehension difficulties for some children with SLI. More recent studies ( Montgomery, 2000 , 2004 ; Montgomery & Evans, 2009 ) provided evidence that sentence comprehension is associated with working memory and claimed that deficits in comprehending complex sentences cannot be explained by a syntax-specific representational deficit. These conclusions were also based primarily on the correlation of independent working" memory measures and sentence comprehension performance. The working memory tasks that are typically employed reflect the temporary storage of verbal material that plays only a secondary role in higher-level language comprehension. It is not surprising that performance on these tasks is correlated, but to better understand the role of working memory in sentence comprehension, we must use tasks that directly manipulate working memory demands in sentences in order to be more informative.

The few studies that have used such a direct manipulation of working memory load in sentences have posited working memory as one of the underlying causes of sentence comprehension problems in children with SLI. In a study of wh -question comprehension with direct manipulation of sentence working' memory demands ( Deevy & Leonard, 2004 ), children with SLI performed similarly to children with TLD on short questions but showed poorer performance on long object questions than on long subject questions. The combination of a more difficult structure with additional length posed more problems for children with SLI. The authors then concluded that working memory places demands on linguistic processing and thus plays an important role in the difficulties experienced by children with SLI. However, the actual difference between conditions was quite small (one to two items) despite the significant statistical findings.

Marton and colleagues (2006) reported that the increasing in the number of words in a sentence, without an increase in grammatical complexity, did not influence performance accuracy to the same extent as did the increase in morphological complexity. In that study, children correctly recalled more words and answered more questions following sentences with simple morphological structures when compared with sentences that contained complex morphology. These results and previous findings ( Marton & Schwartz, 2003 ) suggest an influence of linguistic processing on working memory demands, with a larger impact of linguistic complexity than sentence length on working memory performance accuracy.

In the present study, we examined whether children with SLI have a deficit in their structural assignment. According to the HOD hypothesis ( Cromer, 1978 ), children with language impairment construct a flat rather than a hierarchical representation of sentences leading to comprehension errors. If the HOD is correct, children with SLI will exhibit lower accuracy and select more errors reflecting a nonhierarchical construction than will children with TLD.

We conducted two experiments to examine two types of structural assignment in comprehension: predicates and reflexives. The first experiment focused on predicate–NP relations as in Bishop (1982) . The second focused on reflexives and their antecedent nouns. If the HOD hypothesis is true, it should be valid for both predicates and reflexives.

If the deficit is domain specific as in the CGC and the HOD accounts, working memory effects on sentence comprehension would not occur. We examined this in the second experiment by manipulating sentence length without adding structural complexity. By examining error patterns, we also expected to be able to tease apart syntactic and lexical factors from working memory effects.

Cross-Linguistic Issues

Although the hierarchical structure of the phrases is assumed to be universal, the linear ordering between the head and its complements, as well as between the intermediate level and the specific position, is language specific. The latter is considered a parameter of Universal Grammar, giving rise to various word orders across languages. Brazilian Portuguese is a head-initial language (as are English, French, Hebrew, and many others) in which the head (e.g., the verb ate ) precedes the complement (e.g., the NP an apple in the sentence John ate an apple , from Botwinik-Rotem & Friedmann, 2009 ). There is a high attachment preference in Brazilian Portuguese ( Miyamoto, 1998 ) for both structures under investigation in this study (predicate attachment and reflexive assignment). Thus, it is reasonable to generalize findings from the present study to other head-initial languages and languages with high attachment preference for predicates and reflexives.

Brazilian Portuguese primarily uses reflexive pronouns as clitics attached to the verb as in other Romance languages. Unlike English reflexive pronouns, reflexive clitics in Brazilian Portuguese are unstressed. They have person and number markers (but no gender markers) and cannot be used in isolation. The basic pattern for clitic placement in modern Brazilian Portuguese is pre-verbal. The Brazilian Portuguese third-person reflexive clitic used in the current study is se , as shown in the following example:

A avó atrás da mãe se i olhou. [ The grandma behind the mom looked at herself i .]

Bedore and Leonard (2001) observed that Spanish-speaking children with SLI performed more poorly than both age- and mean length of utterance (MLU)–matched controls in marking gender and number of clitics. As no studies have examined clitic production by Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children with SLI, we aimed to exclude the possible bias of clitic morpheme agreement by presenting only one clitic form: Both possible antecedents of clitics in the present study were third person singular (see the example in Figure 3 ).

An example of the visual (picture) stimuli from Experiment 2 for the target sentence “A avó atrá da mãe está se olhando. [ The grandma behind the mom is looking at herself .]”. C = correct picture; H = hierarchical error picture; P = preposition change picture; R = reverse error picture.

Children with TLD have problems in acquiring certain clitic forms in some languages. Frequent clitic omissions in obligatory contexts and late onset of clitics in the object position have been observed for languages such as Brazilian ( Lopes, 2003 ) and European ( Silva, 2008 ) Portuguese, Italian ( Guasti, 1993 ; Schaeffer, 1997 ), French ( Jakubowicz & Rigaut, 2000 ; Van der Velde, Jakubowicz, & Rigaut, 2002 ), and Catalan ( Wexler, Gavarró & Torrens, 2004 ). However, determinants with the same morphological form of third person clitics are not omitted. For these languages, clitic omission does not occur because of perceptual or prosodic production factors but because of their syntactic roles.

Although reflexive clitics are less problematic for children than other clitics ( Costa & Lobo, 2007 ; Jakubowicz & Rigaut, 2000 ; Silva, 2008 ), the presence of clitics, and not full pronouns such as reflexives in English, for example, still may pose additional difficulties for children other than the pure reflexive assignment examined here. If the presence of clitics posed an additional challenge, we should observe lower accuracy for the reflexive than for the predicate experiment with similar (short) working memory demands.

General Method

Participants.

Thirty-two Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children (19 boys, 13 girls) participated in the two experiments. Children were between the ages of 8;4 and 10;6 and were divided into two aged-matched, equally sized groups (TLD and SLI). All children were paired by age within a 3-month maximum interval by gender (with the exception of one pair) and by socioeconomic status (SES) according to the Brazilian Economic Classification Criterion questionnaire ( Critério de Classificação Econômics Brasil [CCEB]; Associacão Brasileira de Empresas de Pesquisa [ABEP], 2008 ). Children were also matched by educational level: The same number of children were enrolled in third grade (four children), fourth grade (nine children), and fifth grade (three children) in each group. All children came from homes in which Brazilian Portuguese was the only language spoken.

These 16 children (10 boys and six girls) were recruited through the Investigation on Specific Language Impairment Laboratory at the Department of Physical Therapy, Communication Sciences and Disorders and Occupational Therapy of the Medical School of Universidade de São Paulo (Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo), Brazil. The children with SLI were between ages 8;4 and 10;6 ( M = 9;4; SD = 0;9). All of the families were identified as C2 (lower middle class) on the CCEB questionnaire. These children had no history of neurological impairments, no evidence of oral motor disabilities, and no social or emotional difficulties. They all had been diagnosed by a group of speech-language pathologists as having SLI. There is no comprehensive standardized language test in Brazilian Portuguese. The most comprehensive language test available is the ABFW Child Language Test ( Andrade, Befi-Lopes, Fernandes, & Wertzner, 2004 ), which evaluates vocabulary, phonology, fluency, and pragmatics. The ABFW is the most widely used language test in Brazil; it is also used in Portugal. All children from the SLI group had ABFW scores that were at least 1.25 SDs below the mean on vocabulary and fluency measures within normal limits regarding number of stuttering-like disfluencies and percentage of stuttered syllables. Children who had only liquid simplification, cluster simplification, or distortions were included in the study. Other phonological processes (e.g., stopping, deaffrication) were considered as exclusion criteria. All children exhibited a predominance of use of verbal as compared to gesture and nonverbal communication means (see Table 1 for more detailed information on test scores). The mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU m ) in spontaneous speech samples of at least 150 utterances for all children was below at least 1 SD of reference values available for Brazilian Portuguese ( Araujo, 2007 ). The group mean for MLU m was 4.84 ( SD = 0.48).

Mean (and SD) of age, nonverbal IQ, and language test performance of participants.

Note . SLI = specific language impairment; TLD = typical language development; TONI–3 = Test of Nonverbal Intelligence—Third Edition.

Additional criteria for children with SLI selection included normal nonverbal IQ performance (score above 85) as measured by the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence—Third Edition ( Brown, Sherbenou, & Johnsen, 1997 ) and normal hearing as measured by hearing screening at 25 dB HL for the frequencies of 500 Hz, 1000 Hz, and 2000 Hz. All children in the SLI group had persistent histories of language impairment after more than 2 years of speech and language intervention and were receiving speech-language services at the time of testing.

Children in this group were recruited from public schools of Sao Paulo. The 16 children (nine boys and seven girls) were between ages 8;5 and 10;6 ( M = 9;4; SD = 0;8). According to the SES questionnaire, all families of children of this group were classified as C2 on the CCEB (ABEP, 2008) with the exception of one family, which was classified as CI (middle class). These children had scores on the four sections of the ABFW Child Language Test ( Andrade et al., 2004 ) within normal limits. The MLU was not computed in this group due to limits on testing imposed by most of the schools from which children were recruited. Their teachers were questioned about academic performance related to syntax and morphosyntax, and none of the teachers reported difficulties in these areas for any participant. All children from this group had no history of language impairment, normal nonverbal IQ performance (score above 85) as measured by the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence—Third Edition ( Brown et al., 1997 ), and normal hearing as measured by a hearing screening.

Experiment 1

In this experiment, we tested the comprehension of predicate–NP relations (attachment) by children with SLI and their matched peers.

There were 26 trials in this experiment. Each trial consisted of one context sentence, one target sentence, and an array of four pictures. Context sentences had the following structure: Here is a(an) X and a(an) Z [Aqui estão a(o) X e a(o) Z] where X and Z were the nouns of the target sentence (e.g., Here is a chicken and a ball — Aqui estão a galinha e a bola ). Target sentences of this experiment had the following structure: The X in / on/ under / in front of / behind the Z is Y [O X na(o) / acima / abaixo / na frente / atrás de Z é Y], where X and Z were nouns and Y was a color term (e.g., The chicken on the ball is brown — A galinha acima da bola é marrom ). Each visual stimulus included four pictures presented on a computer screen: correct picture (correct attachment or antecedent and correct spatial relation), hierarchical error picture (incorrect attachment or antecedent testing for a hierarchical structural error), preposition change error picture (correct attachment or antecedent with a lexical error on the prepositional relation), and reverse error picture (incorrect attachment or antecedent and spatial relations testing for a complete reversal of relations). Figure 4 illustrates the visual (picture) stimuli for the above trial.

An example of the visual (picture) stimuli from Experiment 1 for the target sentence A galinha em cima da bola é marrom ( The chicken on the ball is brown ).

The stimuli were presented via E-Prime Experimental Control software on a laptop computer. The auditory (context and target sentences) stimuli were digitally recorded by a female Brazilian Portuguese native speaker via Praat software ( Boersma & Weenink, 2006 ) and were presented through the computer speakers at a comfortable audible level.

The trials were randomly presented to avoid length, order, or familiarization effects. The experimenter (first author) verbally provided the following instructions, which were also presented in written form on the computer screen before the beginning of the experiment: First you are going to listen to a sentence introducing the characters. Four pictures with those characters will appear on the computer, and you will listen to another sentence. You will have to point to the picture that shows what the sentence is about . Five practice trials were conducted. Although we planned to present the practice trials again if a child did not seem to understand the task, all of the children successfully completed the practice trials.

For each trial, the child was presented with a context sentence followed by the visual (four-picture array) stimulus and the target sentence. For example, on a single trial, they heard a context sentence (e.g., Here is a circle and a star — Aqui estão um círculo e uma estrela ). Each context sentence had a maximum duration of 5,500 ms. After an interstimulus interval of 1,000 ms, the target sentence and an array of four pictures were presented simultaneously. The target sentences had the maximum duration of 5,000 ms (e.g., The circle in the star is blue — O círculo na estrela é azul ). The picture position in the four quadrants of the computer screen was randomly selected for each trial. The four pictures remained on the computer screen until a response was detected. The child then had to select (by pointing) the picture that corresponded to the sentence (the experimenter pushed the corresponding response button). The responses were classified and analyzed according to picture selection (correct, hierarchical error, preposition error, or reversed error).

Data Analysis

A widely used approach to analyze data from picture selection tests is to consider the responses as continuous data using methods such as t test and analysis of variance (ANOVA). However, this ignores the fact that these responses are categorical data. The validity of using t tests and ANOVAs for categorical response types is questionable ( Ennis & Bi, 1999 ; Stevens, 1946 ). The practical implication of this approach is that an inflated Type I error can result in an erroneous conclusion.

The categorical responses of the current study follow a multinomial distribution (in each trial, the child had to select one picture among the four presented). The observed response patterns exhibited heterogeneity among children, especially in the SLI group, and many null responses, especially for the TLD group. An appropriate, although less commonly used, statistical model for this type of data is the Dirichlet–Multinomial model ( Molenberghs & Verbeke, 2005 ; Paulino & Singer, 2006 ). In our analysis, we fitted the Dirichlet–Multinomial model via maximum likelihood methods and compared the expected response frequencies between and within groups via Wald statistics.

Figure 5 illustrates the responses (in percentage) according to picture type selection (correct, hierarchical, preposition change, and reversed) for both groups (TLD and SLI). Children with SLI had a notably lower percentage of correct responses and selected more of each error-type picture when compared to their TLD chronologically matched controls. We employed the Dirichlet-Multinomial model to estimate the probabilities of each response category (correct, hierarchical, preposition change, reversed) for each group (see Table 2 ). The analysis via Wald statistics revealed an overall effect for group, χ 2 (3, N = 32) = 117.31, p < .001, indicating that the response distributions for children with TLD and children with SLI were, in general, different on the comprehension of syntactic constructions involving a predicate attachment.

M percentage of responses according to picture selection for both groups (TLD and SLI) on Experiment 1 (predicates). Error bars denote 95% confidence interval (CI).

Dirichlet–Multinomial model estimated mean percentage of picture selection for both groups (SLI and TLD) on Experiment 1 (predicates) and on Experiment 2 (reflexives) by working memory condition.

To further investigate this effect, we used between-group comparisons to examine each response type. Children with TLD were significantly more accurate than children with SLI, χ 2 (1, N = 32) = 19,11. p < .001. Moreover, the differences on selection of incorrect pictures presented by the two groups were statistically significant for each of the three types of error: hierarchical, χ 2 (1, N = 32) = 7.85, p = .005; preposition change, χ 2 (1, N = 32) = 7.28, p = .007; and reversed, χ 2 (1, N = 32) = 83.82, p < .001. Thus, the overall lower accuracy of the children with SLI compared with their TLD peers was distributed across the error types.

For the within-group error analysis, there were no significant differences in the selection of the three error response types for any of the groups: SLI, χ 2 (2 , N = 16) = 2.08, p = .35; TLD, χ 2 (2, N = 16) = 0.33, p = .84. This indicates that neither children with SLI nor children with TLD exhibited a dominant error response. Although children with SLI made more errors than did children with TLD, their error distribution is no different than that of children with TLD.

In this experiment, we examined the structural assignment of predicates of children with SLI and their matched controls. Children with SLI performed more poorly than their TLD peers, indicating an overall deficit on the comprehension of sentences with nonadjacent predicate–NP relations in this group. However, a preference for the hierarchical error was not observed. Factors other than a HOD also influenced accuracy of these children. Thus, taken together, these findings do not support the HOD account ( Cromer, 1978 ) as an explanation for the sentence comprehension deficit in SLI.

Experiment 2

In this experiment, we tested the comprehension of reflexives and their antecedent nouns by children with SLI and their chronologically matched peers. We also examined whether working memory demands affected the extent to which children with SLI incorrectly comprehended sentences.

There were 28 trials for the short working memory condition and 28 trials for the long working memory condition. Each trial consisted of one context sentence, one target sentence, and an array of four pictures.

Context sentences had the same structure as those in Experiment 1 (e.g., Here is a grandma and a mom — Aqui estão uma avó e uma mãe ). Target sentences had the following structure: The X in / on / under/ in front of / behind the Z (modifier) is Y [O X na(o) / acima/ abaixo / na frente / atrás de Z (modifier) está Y] . In this experiment, X and Z were nouns and Y was verbal phrase with a reflexive pronoun. In addition, each target sentence was presented in a short and a long version, produced by adding a modifier phrase between the subject and the reflexive without increasing structural complexity (e.g., The grandma behind the mom with the brown skirt is looking at herself — A avó atrás da mãe de saia marrom está se olhando) .

As in Experiment 1, the four visual stimuli were designed to address the configurations of the target sentence (correct picture), the hierarchical error, the preposition change error, and the reverse error. Figure 3 illustrates the picture stimuli of the trial of Experiment 2 exemplified above.

The procedure of Experiment 2 was identical to that of Experiment 1. Trials of Experiments 1 and 2 were randomly mixed together in a single session to avoid effects of length, order, or familiarization. The duration of the study (Experiments 1 and 2) was approximately 40 min. The session was divided into three blocks. Breaks were provided betwen the blocks.

Ms (in percentage) of responses according to picture type selection (correct, hierarchical, preposition change, and reversed) for both groups (TLD and SLI) on the short working memory condition are displayed in Figure 6 . Figure 7 illustrates the results for the long working memory condition. we used the Dirichlet–Multinomial model to estimate the probabilities of each response type (see Table 2 ) and the wald statistic to examine een-and within-group differences.

M percentage of responses according to picture selection for both groups (TLD and SLI) on Experiment 2 (reflexives) on the short working memory condition. Error bars denote 95% CI.

M percentage of responses according to picture selection for both groups (TLD and SLI) on Experiment 2 (reflexives) on the long working memory condition. Error bars denote 95% CI.

Short working memory condition

The Dirichlet-Multinomial model revealed, via wald statistics, an overall effect for group, χ 2 (3, N = 32) = 44.74, p < .001, indicating that response distributions for TLD and SLI children were different for the comprehension of constructions involving reflexive–antecedent assignment with lo working memory demands.

To further investigate this effect, we conducted between-group comparisons for each of the four response types. Children with TLD were significantly more accurate than children with SLI, χ 2 (l, N = 32) = 14.27, p < .001. Moreover, the group differences in selection of incorrect pictures were statistically significant for each of the three types of error: hierarchical, χ 2 (1, N = 32) = 4.67, p = .032; preposition change, χ 2 (1, N = 32) = 5.92, p = .015; and reversed, χ 2 (1, N = 32) = 38.91, p < .001.

In the within-group error analysis, there were no significant differences among the three error types for the SLI group, χ 2 (2, N = 16) = 4.24, p = .12, indicating that the children with SLI did not exhibit a dominant error response. In contrast, the distribution of errors on the TLD group was not homogenous, χ 2 (2, N = 16) = 13.68, p < .001; children with TLD exhibited differences according to the categories of error. These findings indicate a different pattern of error response distributions for children with SLI and children with TLD for the comprehension of reflexive constructions with low working memory demands.

In additional analyses, we investigated whether children with SLI and children with TLD had a preference for errors involving an incorrect syntactic assignment. The preposition change picture represents choices in which the child has constructed a hierarchal structure for the sentence (only making an error in the prepositional relation of the pictured items). The remaining two error choices, hierarchical and reversed, represent incorrect syntactic assignment. Therefore, on the next set of analyses, we combined the responses in order to obtain two categories: correct structural assignment (correct response and preposition error response) and incorrect structural assignment (hierarchical and reversed error responses).

When we analyzed the correct (correct and preposition error pictures) and incorrect (hierarchical and reverse error pictures) structural assignment by combining the responses, the model revealed within-group differences for each of the groups: TLD, χ 2 (1, N = 16) = 471.43, p < .001; SLI, χ 2 (1, N = 16) = 62.93, p < .001. In the comprehension of reflexive constructions with low working memory demands, children exhibit a preference for responses with correct structural assignment regardless of language status.

Long working memory condition

The Wald statistical analysis of the Dirichlet–Multinomial model revealed an overall effect for group, χ 2 (3, N = 32) = 13.00, p = .005, in the comprehension of sentences containing reflexive– antecedent relations with increased working memory demands. This finding indicates that responses of TLD and SLI children were, in general, different on this condition.

To further investigate this effect, we conducted between-group comparisons for each of the response types. Children with TLD were significantly more accurate than children with SLI, χ 2 (1, N = 32) = 12.45, p < .001. Moreover, the groups differed in their selection of incorrect pictures for each of the three types of error: hierarchical, χ 2 (1, N = 32) = 4.33, p = .040; preposition change, χ 2 (1, N = 32) = 3.84,p = .050; and reversed, χ 2 (l, N = 32) = 7.91, p = .005.

The within-group error analysis revealed significant differences for the SLI group, χ 2 (2, N = 16) = 57.48, p < .001, and for the TLD group, χ 2 (2, N = 16) = 95.03, p < .001. Both groups exhibited a heterogeneous error distribution for the comprehension of reflexive constructions with increased working memory demands.

When we analyzed the correct (correct and preposition error pictures) and incorrect (hierarchical and reverse error pictures) syntactic structural assignment by combining the responses, the model revealed within-group differences for the TLD group, χ 2 (1, N = 16) = 9.45,p = .002. However, children with SLI did not exhibit such differences, χ 2 (1, N = 16) = 1.09, p = .29. This finding indicates that when working memory demands were higher, children with SLI exhibited no difference between correct and incorrect syntactic assignment on the comprehension of sentences involving a reflexive– antecedent relation.

Working memory effect

The Wald statistics applied to the statistical model indicated significant differences on accuracy between the two working memory conditions for the TLD group, χ 2 (1, N = 16) = 18.48, p < .001, and for the SLI group, χ 2 (l, N = 16) = 14.88, p < .001. Both groups exhibited a decrease in accuracy with an increase in working memory demands.

A set of analyses examined whether children were more likely to make syntactic (hierarchical and reverse) and lexical (preposition) errors in the long working memory condition. In these analyses, we compared the selection of each error type across the two conditions of working memory. Children with SLI exhibited increased selection of hierarchical, χ 2 (1, N = 16) = 5.04, p = .025, and reversed, χ 2 (1, N = 16 ) = 98.83, p < .001, pictures in the long working memory condition. In contrast, children with SLI exhibited a nonsignificant decrease in the selection of the preposition error picture in the long working memory condition, χ 2 (l, N = 16) = 0.37, p = .540. The same pattern was observed for children with TLD: a significant increase in the selection of the hierarchical, χ 2 (l, N = 16) = 4.31, p = .037, and reversed, χ 2 (1, N = 16) = 71,33, p < .001, types of error, and no change in the selection of the preposition error, χ 2 (1, N = 16) < 0.001, p = .99. The selection of the preposition change picture was the only type of error not responsible for the decreased accuracy noted for both groups on the long working memory condition.

In this experiment, we examined the structural assignment for sentences with reflexives and the effect of a greater working memory demand on accuracy and error types. As expected, the children with SLI had lower accuracy than their typically developing peers in both working memory conditions. The poorer performance of the children with SLI in assigning the correct antecedent to reflexives are in agreement with findings reported by van der Lely (1998) and van der Lely and Stollwerck (1997) . In those earlier studies, the authors reported that children with SLI exhibited deficits on the assignment of the correct antecedent name to reflexive anaphora when syntactic knowledge was required. However, the following factors make comparisons difficult: the smaller number and the increased complexity of stimuli on the STOP, the use of clitics rather than full pronouns in the current experiment, the differences in subjects (the children in the previous study have very severely impaired children with SLI and very young language-matched controls), and the different tasks employed.

Syntactic deficits were not the only factors that affected comprehension of hierarchically complex structures. The CGC hypothesis ( van der Lely, 2005 ) posits that only deficits in the computational grammatical system affect hierarchically complex structures and rejects the notion that working memory plays a role in comprehension of such structures. The increase in working memory demands in the present experiment significantly affected the comprehension accuracy for both groups. Working memory demands interfered with hierarchical structure assignment regardless of language status.

Although our work provides converging evidence that children with SLI have working memory limitations affecting their comprehension ( Dollaghan & Campbell, 1998 ; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990 ; Mainela-Arnold & Evans, 2005 ; Marton & Schwartz, 2003 ; Montgomery, 2004 ; Schwartz, 2009 ), the two groups exhibited a similar decrease in accuracy (approximately 26%) and similar error patterns with increased working memory demands. Both groups made more syntactic errors (i.e., assignment of incorrect antecedent) in the long than in the short working memory condition. Both the hierarchical and the reversed error type involved structural deviations either in the absence of hierarchical relations or reversed syntactic tree components. These errors increased with a more demanding working memory load. In contrast, preposition errors only involved a lexical error and were selected less frequently in response to the longer sentences. The fact that the lexical error choices decreased whereas the syntactic ones increased in the long working memory condition for both groups indicates that working memory has differential effects on language comprehension regardless of language status.

General Discussion

We conducted two experiments designed to examine the ability of children with SLI to establish long-distance relationships between predicates and nouns as well as between reflexives and their antecedents. According to the HOD hypothesis ( Cromer, 1978 ), children with language impairment have a deficit in hierarchical sentence structuring that causes comprehension errors. We compared the comprehension performance and the influence of different working memory demands on two syntactic constructions that require hierarchy knowledge of their elements for a correct comprehension between a group of children with SLI and an age-matched group of children with TLD in order to examine this proposal.

The results of Experiment 1 are not consistent with findings reported by Bishop (1982) . These between-study inconsistencies may reflect methodological differences (e.g., fewer trials and no statistical analyses). Furthermore, the participants in Bishop's study were children with Landau-Kleffner syndrome, and although some similarities in language profiles with children with SLI are expected ( Billard et al., 2009 ; Deonna & Roulet-Perez, 2005 ; Overvliet et al., 2010 ), there do not appear to be any studies that have examined syntactic aspects of comprehension in these children. Although we did observe a syntactic structural assignment influence on sentence miscomprehension of children with SLI, the selection of the hierarchical picture was not the dominant error response as observed by Bishop. Instead, both groups of children exhibited no apparent preference among the three error types (hierarchical, preposition change, or reversed) on Experiment 1. This contradicts the HOD hypothesis that the most common cause of miscomprehension of children with language impairment is a deficit in structuring the syntactic hierarchical representation of the sentence, resulting in incorrect attachment or antecedent selection.

Although children with SLI made more errors than their TLD matched controls, they still got the majority of trials correct in Experiment 1 and in the short condition in Experiment 2. This suggests that other factors (e.g., issues in processing) may underlie sentence comprehension deficits in children with SLI. Previous investigations have shown that children with SLI are influenced by semantic and pragmatic factors when these factors are related to syntactic constraints ( Precious & Conti-Ramsden, 1988 ; van der Lely & Dewart, 1986 ). Although plausibility might affect attachment and antecedent-reflexive relations, this factor was controlled in our study (in all situations, both characters were possible antecedents; both the grandma and the mom could be looking at themselves). Moreover, semantic and pragmatic factors may have different effects on attachment and on antecedent–reflexive relations. Predicates and reflexives differ in that the adjective used in the attachment is an open-class word, whereas the reflexive pronoun is a closed-class word and, in this case, a clitic. Although such effects could have influenced the two experiments, this was not observed in the response patterns. Similar accuracy and similar error type distributions were observed in Experiment 1 and in the short working memory condition of Experiment 2.

Other cognitive abilities could also have influenced the performance of children with SLI in the present study. Studies have shown that children with SLI exhibit difficulties with certain cognitive tasks besides having nonverbal IQs near the low end of normal ( Hick, Botting & Conti-Ramsden, 2005 ; Kamhi, Catts, Mauer, Apel, & Gentry, 1988 ; Marton, 2008 ). Hick and colleagues (2005) found that children with SLI exhibit a visuospatial deficit, but only when the tasks also involve working memory demands. Our tasks did not involve visuospatial working memory; pictures were presented simultaneously and remained in view until a response was detected.

In Experiment 2, although children with SLI did get a number of trials correct, they were less accurate than their age-matched peers. Although the deficit in syntactic assignment of antecedent nouns to reflexives is consistent with findings from van der Lely (1998) and van der Lely and Stollwerck (1997) , some differences between our study and these studies should be noted. In the current study, the reflexives were marked by a clitic pronoun, and there has been evidence for a deficit in clitic acquisition for many Romance languages including Brazilian Portuguese ( Lopes, 2003 ). Furthermore, it is noteworthy that clitics are unstressed, and the lack of perceptual salience could also have caused an additional difficulty when compared to full pronouns. Although the clitics in the reflexive constructions could have caused additional problems for children with SLI, this does not seem to have occurred. When working memory demands were more limited, the children with SLI were similarly accurate in the predicate and the reflexive experiments. Van der Lely and colleagues employed a forced-choice judgment task (children saw only one picture and judged whether it matched a sentence they heard), which may have been easier than making a selection from a set of four pictures. However, in a yes/no judgment, guessing may have had a greater effect on the results. Although the three studies examined the assignment of an antecedent noun to a reflexive, three different syntactic constructions were used. Our study involved sentences with an NP with a complex subject followed by a verbal phrase (VP) with a reflexive pronoun (e.g., The grandma behind the mom is looking at herself ). Van der Lely and Stollwerck (1997) and van der Lely (1998) used a subordinate structure (e.g., Mowgli says Baloo Bear is tickling himself .) and a question structure (e.g., Is Mowgli tickling himself? ). The complex subjects in our study might have been more challenging than the simple subjects in the other two studies. Furthermore, the questions used in the studies by van der Lely and colleagues involved verb movement and included only one possible antecedent, whereas the sentences with subordinate clauses added substantial syntactic complexity that may have confounded the comprehension of reflexives. In our study, the control of the syntactic construction, the analysis of the error types presented by children, and the analysis of working memory demands are important advances.

A different pattern of response was observed in both groups across the working memory demands. With an increased working memory demand, the likelihood of a syntactic representational error also increased. In contrast, with the increased working memory demand, we observed no change in the number of lexical (prepositional) errors. Thus, there appears to be a working memory effect on structuring syntactic representations that was not predicted by HOD ( Cromer, 1978 ) or by the CGC ( van der Lely, 2005 ; van der Lely & Stollwerck, 1997 ) proposals. Clearly, sentence comprehension difficulties are not only a matter of structural assignment but also an effect of working memory demands. Importantly, children with TLD also exhibit working memory effects.

Marton and colleagues (2006) have found that working memory deficits are related to increases in morpho-syntactic or syntactic complexity rather than to absolute capacity. However, when we controlled for syntactic complexity (long working memory condition sentences of the current study had no additional structural complexity), working memory still plays an important role in sentence comprehension. This supports the view that the effect of working memory demands on linguistic processing, and not just linguistic complexity, plays an important role in the sentence comprehension difficulties experienced by children with SLI ( Deevy & Leonard, 2004 ). This was also true for children with TLD. Thus, there seems to be a direct effect of working memory demand on sentence comprehension in children rather than simply an association of measures reflecting working memory and sentence comprehension performance as suggested by Montgomery and Evans (2009) and Just and Carpenter (1992) .

Waters and Caplan (1996) proposed that at least two different working memory capacities subserve language processing. Although we did not examine this directly, we found evidence of different working memory effects for syntactic (hierarchical structure) and lexical (preposition) factors in sentence comprehension. In our study, the hierarchical relations of the syntactic tree components were affected by the high working memory demand to a greater extent than the preposition use. McElree and colleagues ( McElree. 1998 , 2000 ; McElree et al., 2003 ) have proposed that sentence comprehension is subserved by content-addressable memory structures in which syntactic and semantic constraints provide direct access to relevant representations. Although according to this view both syntactic and semantic constraints seem to be available, there might be different effects on sentence comprehension for each of these constraints. Moreover, if linguistic comprehension is related to the central executive component of Baddele's model (1986), as suggested by Marton and colleagues (2006) , the model may also need to account for these differential effects across language features.

Although there are mixed findings regarding which working memory measure/component is most closely associated with language comprehension, it is clear from our data that direct manipulation of working memory on sentences does have a general effect on syntactic structural assignment. Furthermore, working memory, as measured by direct manipulation of sentences without adding syntactic structural complexity, has differential effects on comprehension errors (syntactic vs. lexical) regardless of language status.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) Grant RO1DC003885 and Professional Staff Council, City University of New York Grant 62744-00 40, both awarded to the seventh author; a grant from Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) (CAPES), awarded to the first author, and NIDCD Grant R03DC006175, awarded to the fourth author. We thank the children and families who participated, Fabiola Juste for recording the audio stimuli, and Hia Datta for drawing the picture stimuli. We are also grateful to Julio Singer for his contribution to data analysis.

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Towards Keyphrase Assignment for Texts in Portuguese Language

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• Raquel Silveira 18 ,
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Keyphrase assignment has often been confounded with keyphrase extraction, since the basic hypothesis is that a keyphrase of a text must be extracted from this text. Typically, keyphrase extraction approaches use a training set restricted to textual terms, reducing the learning capabilities of any inductive algorithm. Our research investigates ways to improve the accuracy of the keyphrase assignment systems for texts in Portuguese language by allowing classification algorithms to learn from non-textual terms as well. The basic assumption we have followed is that non-textual terms can be included into the training set by inference from an eventual semantic relationship with textual terms. In order to discover the latent relationship between non-textual and textual terms, we use deductive strategies to be applied in Portuguese common sense bases such as Wikipedia and InferenceNet. We show that algorithms that follow our approach outperform others that do not use the same methods introduced here.

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Silveira, R., Furtado, V., Pinheiro, V. (2016). Towards Keyphrase Assignment for Texts in Portuguese Language. In: Silva, J., Ribeiro, R., Quaresma, P., Adami, A., Branco, A. (eds) Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9727. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41552-9_17

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