Impaired procedural learning in language impairment: Results from probabilistic categorization

Abstract

The Weather Prediction (WP) Task is a classical task of probabilistic category learning generally used for examining the dissociation of procedural and declarative memory. The current study focuses on performance of children with language impairment (LI) and compares their performance to that of typically developing (TD) children and adults with the aim of testing the procedural deficit hypothesis of LI (PDH; Ullman & Pierpont, 2005), which states that language impairment is not a specific linguistic phenomenon, but results from the dysfunction of a more general cognitive system: the procedural system. To test the generality of the procedural impairment, we needed a task that is dissimilar from language in that it does not build on sequential information. Children with language impairment show deficient learning on the Weather Prediction Task, which already appears at the early stages of the task. These results, in line with the PDH, point to the deficit of the procedural system in language impairment going beyond the language system. Whether this deficit is selective to the procedural system or is complemented by deficits in the declarative system is the subject of future studies.

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

“…These include differences in the nonverbal IQ test used, the nonverbal IQ cutoff score criterion for participant inclusion, participants' age, and whether the studies matched the SLI and TD groups for SES. On the basis of prior work demonstrating subtle nonverbal cognitive deficits in children with SLI (e.g., Archibald & Gathercole, 2006b;Kemény & Lukács, 2010; and a handful of studies suggesting that children with SLI obtain lower nonverbal IQ test scores than their TD peers (Cole et al, 1994;Miller & Gilbert, 2008), we expected that the children with SLI would score significantly lower than their TD peers on nonverbal IQ tests. Figure 1 provides a flow chart illustrating the selection of the final studies included in the meta-analysis.…”

“…In addition to deficits in language, a number of researchers have found that many children with SLI also present with subtle deficits in nonverbal cognition, including but not limited to auditory and visual attention (e.g., Finneran, Francis, & Leonard, 2009;Noterdaeme, Amorosa, Mildenberger, Sitter, & Minnow, 2001;, visuospatial working memory (e.g., Archibald & Gathercole, 2006b;Bavin, Wilson, Maruff, & Sleeman, 2005;Hick, Botting, & Conti-Ramsden, 2005), serial reaction time learning (e.g., Kemény & Lukács, 2010;Tomblin, Mainela-Arnold, & Zhang, 2007), and deductive reasoning (e.g., Newton, Roberts, & Donlan, 2010). In contrast to linguistic-based theories, which isolate the deficits of SLI to the linguistic system, cognitive-based theories attempt to account for both the linguistic and the nonlinguistic cognitive difficulties of children with SLI by positing that they both stem from a nonlinguistic cognitive or processing deficiency.…”

“…Given the growing body of research documenting a wide variety of nonverbal cognitive difficulties on experimental tasks for children with SLI (e.g., Archibald & Gathercole, 2006b;Bavin et al, 2005;Finneran et al, 2009;Hick et al, 2005;Kemény & Lukács, 2010;Noterdaeme et al, 2001;, we would predict that children with SLI would perform poorly relative to their TD peers on norm-referenced tests of nonverbal IQ. Indeed, a handful of investigations have found that children with SLI do tend to perform poorer on such tests relative to TD controls (Cole et al, 1994;Miller & Gilbert, 2008).…”

“…The normal range of cognition is typically verified through the use of scores on nonverbal cognitive tests (e.g., Leonard, 1998;Plante, Bahl, Vance, & Gerken, 2011;Stark & Tallal, 1981). However, a large body of research has documented a range of nonverbal cognitive deficits in children with SLI (e.g., Archibald & Gathercole, 2006b;Kemény & Lukács, 2010;Spaulding, Plante, & Vance, 2008). Prior work has suggested that such deficits manifest as lower scores than their typically developing (TD) peers on tests of nonverbal cognition (e.g., Cole, Mills, & Kelley, 1994;Miller & Gilbert, 2008).…”

Sentence Repetition Accuracy in Adults With Developmental Language Impairment: Interactions of Participant Capacities and Sentence Structures

“…Studies have shown that children (Kemeny & Lukacs, 2010;Lum, Gelgic, & Conti-Ramsden, 2010), adolescents (Tomblin, Mainela-Arnold, & Zhang, 2007), and adults (Lee & Tomblin, 2012) with DLI have more limited procedural memory ability for verbal information. Findings are less consistent with the PDH when the procedural memory task involves nonverbal information (Lum & Conti-Ramsden, 2013) or when the task does not involve learning discrete sequences (Hsu & Bishop, 2014).…”