Differences in the Performance of Children With Specific Language Impairment and Their Typically Developing Peers on Nonverbal Cognitive Tests: A Meta-Analysis

Purpose With Aim 1, we compared the comprehension of and sensitivity to canonical and noncanonical word order structures in school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and same-age typically developing (TD) children. Aim 2 centered on the developmental improvement of sentence comprehension in the groups. With Aim 3, we compared the comprehension error patterns of the groups. Method Using a “Whatdunit” agent selection task, 117 children with SLI and 117 TD children (ages 7:0–11:11, years:months) propensity matched on age, gender, mother's education, and family income pointed to the picture that best represented the agent in semantically implausible canonical structures (subject–verb–object, subject relative) and noncanonical structures (passive, object relative). Results The SLI group performed worse than the TD group across sentence types. TD children demonstrated developmental improvement across each sentence type, but children with SLI showed improvement only for canonical sentences. Both groups chose the object noun as agent significantly more often than the noun appearing in a prepositional phrase. Conclusions In the absence of semantic–pragmatic cues, comprehension of canonical and noncanonical sentences by children with SLI is limited, with noncanonical sentence comprehension being disproportionately limited. The children's ability to make proper semantic role assignments to the noun arguments in sentences, especially noncanonical, is significantly hindered.

Section: Td Groupsupporting

confidence: 77%

“Whatdunit?” Sentence Comprehension Abilities of Children With SLI: Sensitivity to Word Order in Canonical and Noncanonical Structures

Montgomery

Gillam

Evans

et al. 2017

“…Although both groups scored within the average range according to the norms of the TONI, there was a statistically significant group difference, F(1, 38) = 8.80, p = .005, h p 2 = .188. This is not an unusual finding: A recent meta-analysis showed that across 131 studies published between 1995 and 2012, children with SLI scored, on average, 0.69 SD below their peers with TLD on measures of nonverbal cognition (Gallinat & Spaulding, 2014).…”

Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Control of Auditory Attention in Children With Specific Language Impairment

Victorino

Schwartz

2015

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) appear to demonstrate deficits in attention and its control. Selective attention involves the cognitive control of attention directed toward a relevant stimulus and simultaneous inhibition of attention toward irrelevant stimuli. The current study examined attention control during a cross-modal word recognition task. Method: Twenty participants with SLI (ages 9-12 years) and 20 age-matched peers with typical language development (TLD) listened to words through headphones and were instructed to attend to the words in 1 ear while ignoring the words in the other ear. They were simultaneously presented with pictures and asked to make a lexical decision about whether the pictures and auditory words were the same or different. Accuracy and reaction time were measured in 5 conditions, in which the stimulus in the unattended channel was manipulated. Results: The groups performed with similar accuracy. Compared with their peers with TLD, children with SLI had slower reaction times overall and different within-group patterns of performance by condition. Conclusions: Children with TLD showed efficient inhibitory control in conditions that required active suppression of competing stimuli. Participants with SLI had difficulty exerting control over their auditory attention in all conditions, with particular difficulty inhibiting distractors of all types.

“…Given that dyslexia is a brain-based developmental disorder, it is not surprising to find some of these differences. Just as specific language impairment is notoriously nonspecific in terms of deficits (e.g., lower IQ; Gallinat & Spaulding, 2014), it is not surprising to find evidence of other mild cognitive and learning differences in children with dyslexia. However, that does not make it easy to interpret how these differences may play a role in performance on different tasks children with dyslexia encounter daily.…”

Section: Nature Of Learnersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word Learning Deficits in Children With Dyslexia

Alt

Hogan

Green

et al. 2017

dPurpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate word learning in children with dyslexia to ascertain their strengths and weaknesses during the configuration stage of word learning. Method: Children with typical development (N = 116) and dyslexia (N = 68) participated in computer-based word learning games that assessed word learning in 4 sets of games that manipulated phonological or visuospatial demands. All children were monolingual English-speaking 2nd graders without oral language impairment. The word learning games measured children's ability to link novel names with novel objects, to make decisions about the accuracy of those names and objects, to recognize the semantic features of the objects, and to produce the names of the novel words.Accuracy data were analyzed using analyses of covariance with nonverbal intelligence scores as a covariate. Results: Word learning deficits were evident for children with dyslexia across every type of manipulation and on 3 of 5 tasks, but not for every combination of task/ manipulation. Deficits were more common when task demands taxed phonology. Visuospatial manipulations led to both disadvantages and advantages for children with dyslexia. Conclusion: Children with dyslexia evidence spoken word learning deficits, but their performance is highly dependent on manipulations and task demand, suggesting a processing trade-off between visuospatial and phonological demands.