Lexical learning and lexical processing in children with developmental language impairments

Abstract

Lexical skills are a crucial component of language comprehension and production. This paper reviews evidence for lexical-level deficits in children and young people with developmental language impairment (LI). Across a range of tasks, LI is associated with reduced vocabulary knowledge in terms of both breadth and depth and difficulty with learning and retaining new words; evidence is emerging from on-line tasks to suggest that low levels of language skill are associated with differences in lexical competition in spoken word recognition. The role of lexical deficits in understanding the nature of LI is also discussed.

When words fail us: insights into language processing from developmental and acquired disorders

“…For many years, this was seen as a consequence of a deficit either in perceptual processing or in underlying language representations, depending on one's theoretical persuasion. More recently, however, there has been interest in the idea that the learning process itself might be impaired [25,52]. Such a view is exemplified in the procedural deficit hypothesis of developmental language impairment [53].…”

When the daffodat flew to the intergalactic zoo: Off-line consolidation is critical for word learning from stories.

“…sensitive to part-word probability (i.e., the extent to which a word contains sound sequences that overlap with other words; Metsala & Walley, 1998;Storkell & Hoover, 2011) and that low levels of oral language are associated with differences in lexical competition 9 during spoken word recognition (Nation, 2014). Hence, it may be hypothesised that integration (as indexed by lexical competition).…”

Word production errors in children with developmental language impairments

“…Furthermore, as Nation [6] demonstrates in her paper, children with developmental language impairments are likely to have difficulties learning new words and difficulties with spoken word recognition.…”