Lab News
We have learned that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulty producing novel signs accurately. New words learned with the hands show similar phonological (sound/sign pattern) deficits to those learned in spoken language. In the sign domain, errors are observed in the features of hand shape, movement path, and hand orientation. Children with DLD also show increased motor variability in their hands when they are producing novel signs that require bimanual and coordinated movement sequences (Goffman, Factor, Barna, Cai, & Feld, 2023).
We have learned that children with DLD show less accurate and more variable production of simple musical sequences than their typically developing peers. These results support domain general deficits in sequential aspects of production (Kreidler, Vuolo, & Goffman, 2023).
We have enjoyed collaborating with Alan Wisler at Utah State University and Jun Wang at University of Texas-Austin. We have developed new methods for studying speech motion variability that do not depend on expensive equipment but that use simple acoustic recordings of speech (Benham, Wisler, Wang, & Goffman, 2023).
In this theoretical paper, we lay out our developmental account of how infants, children, and adults learn sound patterns that do or do not include sequential dependencies. Infants and young children show surprising learning skills that adults do not. We argue that DLD is a disorder in the ability to detect and deploy sequential dependencies over multiple domains (Goffman & Gerken, 2023).