Short-term memory and vocabulary development in children with Down syndrome and children with specific language impairment

Abstract

This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. to Gina Conti-Ramsden (R000-23-9454). This work forms part of the doctoral thesis of the first author. We would like to extend our thanks to the families and schools that participated in the project. Permanent repository link AbstractA longitudinal comparison was made between development of verbal and visuospatial short-term memory and vocabulary in children with Down syndrome and children with specific language impairment (SLI), including typically developing children as a control group. Participants were twelve children with Down syndrome (mean chronological age 9;9 years; 6 males, 6 females), nine children with SLI (mean chronological age 3;9 years; 4 males, 5 females) and twelve typically developing children (mean chronological age 4;4 years, 5 males, 7 females). Participants were matched on mental age (mean mental age 4;3 years). All completed verbal short-term memory, visuo-spatial short-term memory and expressive and receptive vocabulary tasks on three occasions over a year. Similarities were seen in the clinical groups with respect to verbal short-term memory. There was some evidence of difficulty in visuospatial short-term memory in the children with SLI relative to the other groups, but all three groups of children showed overlap in visuo-spatial short-term memory performance. At the final time-point vocabulary performance in the clinical groups was similar, and the typically developing children showed higher vocabulary abilities than both clinical groups.3

The comprehension of passives in Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…More specifically, psychological passives are expected to remain difficult longer still in ASD, as has been found for SLI (van der Lely 1996;Babyonyshev et al 2005). Given that children with SLI are reported to present difficulties with verbal working memory, we predict that children with ASD presenting difficulties with passives should also present difficulties with verbal working memory (Gathercole & Baddeley 1990;Montgomery 2002;Hick et al 2005;Montgomery & Evans 2009;Marinis & Saddy 2013). More precisely, mastery of passives in ASD should show a relation with increased working memory resources, as has been highlighted for SLI (Marinis & Saddy 2013).…”

“…Interestingly, these populations also show deficits in verbal working memory (e.g. Rhodes et al 2011 Gathercole & Baddeley 1990;Hick et al 2005 for SLI), and working memory resources have been hypothesized to be involved in the processing of passives (Montgomery 2002;Montgomery & Evans 2009). Due to the movement operation involved, these structures require storing of the NPs of the sentence in memory before syntactically and semantically integrating with the verb phrase thanks to the cue provided by the passive morphology (e.g.…”

“…That language impairment and nonverbal abilities can be dissociated in ASD is reminiscent of SLI, and some researchers have indeed argued that subgroups on the autistic spectrum may present language profiles reminiscent of SLI, displaying impairments in phonology and syntax (Kjelgaard & Tager-Flusberg 2001;Roberts et al 2004;Tager-Flusberg 2006), possibly because there is a shared etiology (Bishop 2010). In support of this view, one of the hallmarks of SLI, namely difficulty in verbal working memory (Gathercole & Baddeley 1990;Montgomery 2002;Hick et al 2005;Montgomery & Evans 2009;Marinis & Saddy 2013), has indeed been reported in subgroups with ASD as well, and found to relate to syntax (Roberts et al 2004;Eigsti 2009;Kjelgaard & Tager-Flusberg 2010;Riches et al 2010;Durrleman & Delage 2016). In the current work, we asked if the comprehension of passive constructions, a vulnerable domain in SLI (van der Lely 1996; Rice et al 2001; Leonard et al 2006), is impaired in a similar fashion in ASD.…”

Distúrbio Específico de Linguagem: Caracterização Neuropsicológica

“…Nonetheless, even though these children present good non-verbal skills, defi cits in visual memory tasks, as reported in some studies (Buiza-Navarrete et al, 2007;Evans, Selinger, & Pollak, 2011;Hick, Botting, & ContiRamsden, 2005a, 2005bMarton, 2008;Menezes, Takiuchi, & Befi -Lopes, 2007), should be taken into account because they suggest visual cues are not being used to help the development of verbal aspects, as occurs in children with normal development. Indeed, the results of some studies, though some are contradictory, seem to indicate diffi culties in tasks in which stimuli are complex and/or in which there is a spatial dimension (Buiza-Navarrete et al, 2007;Hick et al, 2005aHick et al, , 2005bMarton, 2008;Menezes et al, 2007).…”

“…Studies addressing verbal memory report that children with SLI obtain poorer results when compared to control groups (Hick et al, 2005a(Hick et al, , 2005bMuñoz-López & Carballo, 2005). Notwithstanding the fact that verbal memory is one of the most studied fi elds within SLI, narrative memory has been neglected.…”