Processing of Scene Grammar Inconsistencies in Children with Developmental Language Disorder—Insights from Implicit and Explicit Measures

Background/Objectives: Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) are often associated with co-occurring neurodevelopmental difficulties, including attentional or social-emotional problems. Another non-verbal domain, i.e. visual cognition and its relationship to DLD, is virtually unexplored. However, learning visuospatial regularities is crucial for navigating our daily environment. These regularities show certain similarities to the structure of language and there is preliminary evidence for a relationship between scene processing and language competence in preschoolers with and without DLD. The study compared implicit and explicit visuospatial knowledge of everyday indoor scenes in older children aged 6 to 10 years of both groups. Methods: We measured dwell times on semantic and syntactic object-scene inconsistencies via eye-tracking, the performance on an object-placement task, and their associations with children’s language, visual, and cognitive skills. Results: Visual attention towards object scene inconsistencies was highly comparable between groups, but children with DLD scored lower in a visual perception test and high language skills were associated with high visuo-cognitive performance in both tasks. In explicit scene grammar measure, this relationship only existed for children with DLD and disappeared when non-verbal cognitive performance was controlled. Conclusions: The acquisition of visual-spatial and linguistic knowledge is a multimodal process. Our study suggests the existence of mild problems in visuospatial processing, co-occurring with DLD, partly influenced by age and nonverbal cognitive ability. If scenes are perceived differently, this may also affect how words for objects and spatial relations are learned and may thus affect treatment.