Seeing problems that may not exist: A reply to West et al.'s (2018) questioning of the procedural deficit hypothesis

Conway, Christopher M.; Arciuli, Joanne; Lum, Jarrad A. G.; Ullman, Michael T.

doi:10.1111/desc.12814

Cited by 26 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…As to the validity of our results, the present study combined two measures that are commonly used to measure the construct of statistical learning. First, disruption peaks have been shown to be a valid measure of people's sensitivity to statistical regularities in serial reaction time studies (e.g., Conway, Arciuli, Lum, & Ullman, ; Lum et al., ). Second, NAD learning studies have shown that infants and adults learn structure from exposure to miniature artificial languages comparable to the language used in the present study (Gómez, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children With Developmental Language Disorder Have an Auditory Verbal Statistical Learning Deficit: Evidence From an Online Measure

et al. 2019

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Successful language use requires the ability to process nonadjacent dependencies (NADs) that occur in linguistic input. Learning such structural regularities seems therefore crucial for children, and researchers have indeed proposed that language problems in children with developmental language disorder (DLD), especially problems with grammar, are due to their decreased sensitivity to NADs. Because the evidence supporting this claim is scarce, we compared children with DLD (n = 36; Mage = 9.1 years) and without DLD (n = 36; Mage = 9.1 years) performing a learning task with NADs. Using response times as an online measure of learning NADs, we observed that participants with DLD were less sensitive to NADs than were typically developing peers. The confidence intervals of the effect, however, indicated that the effect was probably small in size. We discuss clinical and theoretical implications of the present study in light of this effect size. Open Practices This article has been awarded Open Materials and Open Data badges. All data, materials, and analysis scripts for this study are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/8a3yv. The study materials are also publicly available via the IRIS database at https://www.iris-database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children With Developmental Language Disorder Have an Auditory Verbal Statistical Learning Deficit: Evidence From an Online Measure

et al. 2019

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“…Conway et al (2019) claims that poor reliability can only attenuate relationships. The implicit learning tasks had poor reliability and did not correlate with language or reading skills.…”

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“…Conway et al (2019) claims that poor reliability can only attenuate relationships. unpredictable sequences on the SRT task emerge early.…”

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“…No task is a process pure test of procedural learning (Shanks & St John, 1994). Conway et al (2019) claims that poor reliability can only attenuate relationships. Both alternating and probabilistic SRT tasks have been used to do this (e.g., Gabriel, Maillart, Guillaume, Stefaniak, & Meulemans, 2011;Howard, Howard, Japikse, & Eden, 2006).…”

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“…However, the problem of low reliability remains if we use measures of performance from the end of our task. Conway et al (2019) claims that poor reliability can only attenuate relationships. This is true but having reliable measures is nevertheless essential.…”

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The procedural deficit hypothesis of language learning disorders: We still see some serious problems

West

Vadillo

Shanks

et al. 2019

Developmental Science

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West, Vadillo, Shanks, and Hulme (2018) examined the relationship between implicit learning and reading and language attainment in 7to 8-year-old children. The implicit learning tasks had poor reliability and did not correlate with language or reading skills. These findings raise problems for the claim that Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Dyslexia are caused (at least in part) by a deficit in procedural learning (the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis (PDH)). The commentary by Conway, Arciuli, Lum, & Ullman (2019) claims our findings are irrelevant to the PDH because we studied a representative sample of children. However, both DLD and Dyslexia are "dimensional" disorders (Hulme & Snowling, 2009). The best established causal risk factors for dyslexia (phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, Rapid Automatized Naming) show strong correlations with reading ability in unselected samples, and robust deficits in children classified as dyslexic. It is always possible that risk factors will be found that only play a causal role at the bottom end of the ability range, but no such factors have been identified for DLD or dyslexia to date. There was no sign in our data that implicit learning related to language or reading attainment in the bottom of the distribution only. The commentary claims that only SRT tasks involve procedural learning, while other tasks involve implicit (but not procedural) learning. Their arguments about the neural bases of different learning tasks are highly speculative: both the sequence learning and contextual cueing tasks we employed are known to involve the basal ganglia (van Asselen et al., 2009; Wilkinson, Khan, & Jahanshahi, 2009).A major challenge is whether implicit/procedural learning tasks do indeed recruit different cognitive mechanisms; this requires the development of a clear taxonomy of tasks, and evidence that different tasks recruiting the same hypothetical mechanism are reliable and correlate well together. Our article was an attempt to address these issues.The criticism that we used an inappropriate measure of learning on the SRT task is also incorrect. unpredictable sequences on the SRT task emerge early. However, the problem of low reliability remains if we use measures of performance from the end of our task. Conway et al. (2019) claims that poor reliability can only attenuate relationships. This is true but having reliable measures is nevertheless essential. The claim that "meta-analyses have… shown that individuals with SLI or dyslexia perform significantly worse than TD controls on the SRT task" is misleading. In reviewing the literature investigating the PDH using SRT tasks, we counted 46 published studies (up to April 2017); approximately 50% reported null findings for their principal measure of procedural learning.The second commentary (Krishnan & Watkins, 2019) concludes that we need "better measurements of sequential learning…" and "clearer definitions of what kind of learning … is being measured by a behavioural task". We heartily agree and hope our paper contri...

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Evaluation of a tablet‐based assessment tool for measuring cognition among children 4–6 years of age in Ghana

et al. 2022

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Objectives To investigate several basic psychometric properties, including construct, convergent and discriminant validity, of the tablet‐based Rapid Assessment of Cognitive and Emotional Regulation (RACER) among children aged 4–6 years in Ghana. Methods We investigated whether RACER tasks administered to children in Ghana could successfully reproduce expected patterns of performance previously found in high‐income countries on similar tasks assessing inhibitory control (e.g., slower responses on inhibition trials), declarative memory (e.g., higher accuracy on previously seen items), and procedural memory (e.g., faster responses on sequence blocks). Next, we assessed the validity of declarative memory and inhibitory control scores by examining associations of these scores with corresponding paper‐based test scores and increasing child age. Lastly, we examined whether RACER was more sensitive than paper‐based tests to environmental risk factors common in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs). Results Of the 966 children enrolled, more than 96% completed the declarative memory and inhibitory control tasks; however, around 30% of children were excluded from data analysis on the procedural memory task due to missing more than half of trials. The performance of children in Ghana replicated previously documented patterns of performance. RACER inhibitory control accuracy score was significantly correlated with child age ( r (929) = .09, p = .007). However, our findings did not support other hypotheses. Conclusions The high task completion rates and replication of expected patterns support that certain RACER sub‐tasks are feasible for measuring child cognitive development in LMIC settings. However, this study did not provide evidence to support that RACER is a valid tool to capture meaningful individual differences among children aged 4–6 years in Ghana.

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Seeing problems that may not exist: A reply to West et al.'s (2018) questioning of the procedural deficit hypothesis

Cited by 26 publications

References 23 publications

Children With Developmental Language Disorder Have an Auditory Verbal Statistical Learning Deficit: Evidence From an Online Measure

Children With Developmental Language Disorder Have an Auditory Verbal Statistical Learning Deficit: Evidence From an Online Measure

The procedural deficit hypothesis of language learning disorders: We still see some serious problems

Evaluation of a tablet‐based assessment tool for measuring cognition among children 4–6 years of age in Ghana

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