Hypothesis-Testing and Nonlinguistic Symbolic Abilities in Language-Impaired Children

Abstract

This study sought to clarify further the cognitive abilities of language-impaired children by examining their hypothesis-testing and nonlinguistic symbolic abilities. A discrimination learning task and a concept formation task were used to measure hypothesis-testing abilities, and a haptic (touch) recognition task was used to assess nonlinguistic symbolic abilities. Subjects were 10 language-impaired and 10 language-normal children matched for performance Mental Age. Measures of expressive and receptive language were also obtained from each child. The language-impaired children were found to perform significantly poorer than their MA controls on the haptic recognition task and on a portion of the discrimination learning task. No differences were found between the two groups' concept formation abilities. Correlational analyses revealed a particularly strong positive relationship between performance on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the haptic recognition tasks. It was speculated that this relationship was motivated by the symbolic demands of these tasks. One implication of this speculation is that a symbolic representational deficit might better explain the receptive language deficit than the expressive one.

Voice Processing Abilities in Children with Autism, Children with Specific Language Impairments, and Young Typically Developing Children

“…In the first place, it seems from the results of the affect naming test that children with SLI have difficulty in interpreting vocally expressed emotion. In the second place, it is known that some children with SLI have cross-modal processing impairments (Kamhi et al, 1984), and the positive correlation between voice-face and sound-object identity matching in the children with SLI in Experiment 1 tends to confirm this. The fact that affect matching was even more impaired than affect naming in the children with SLI provides further evidence suggesting that crossmodal processing impairments contributed to poor performance on the affect matching task.…”

Processing Limitations in Children With Specific Language Impairment: The Role of Executive Function

“…Kamhi, Catts, Koenig, and Lewis (1984) argued that the strengths and weaknesses shown by children with SLI could be explained by examining the general cognitive demands of a task. The greater the demand, the more children with SLI should show deficits, due to their reduced processing capacity.…”

“…Children with SLI may not have difficulty learning new rules (visual or verbal), but they may have problems reorganizing or incorporating new information into their existing knowledge base and accessing linguistic information that has already been stored (Swisher & Snow, 1994)Fparticularly if the learning situation activates misleading information that must be inhibited. Kamhi, Catts, Koenig, and Lewis (1984) argued that the strengths and weaknesses shown by children with SLI could be explained by examining the general cognitive demands of a task. The greater the demand, the more children with SLI should show deficits, due to their reduced processing capacity.…”

Assessing Children with Language Impairments: A Study on Kannada, a South Indian Language

“…All the 4 age groups functioned at levels equivalent to normal 5-year-old children. In other studies, these deficits found in the abilities of children with language impairments were variously attributed to linguistic skills (Wiig et al, 1983;Morice & Slaghius, 1985), to memory deficits (Leonard et al, 2007) and metalinguistic skills like learning to discriminate and form concepts (Kamhi et al, 1984).…”