Statistical Learning in the Visuomotor Domain and Its Relation to Grammatical Proficiency in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder: A Conceptual Replication and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have difficulties acquiring the grammatical rules of their native language. It has been proposed that children's detection of sequential statistical patterns correlates with grammatical proficiency and hence that a deficit in the detection of these regularities may underlie the difficulties with grammar observed in children with DLD. Although there is some empirical evidence supporting this claim, individual studies, both in children with and without DLD, vary in the strength of their reported associations. The aim of the present study is therefore to evaluate the evidence for the proposed association. This is achieved by means of (a) a conceptual replication study on 35 children with DLD and 35 typically developing children who performed the serial reaction time task and a test of grammatical proficiency and (b) a metaanalysis over 19 unique effect sizes, which collectively examined the serial reaction time task-expressive grammar correlation in 139 children with DLD and 573 typically developing children. Both outcomes provide no evidence for or against the existence of the proposed association. Neither do they provide evidence for a difference in the strength of the association between both groups of children. When acquiring their native language, children unconsciously detect and process structural regularities that facilitate word extraction, the induction of phonological and grammatical categories and the representation of (morpho)syntactic rules (Erickson & Thiessen, 2015; Mintz, 2003; Saffran et al., 1996; Wijnen, 2013). It has been proposed that children detect and process these regularities via statistical learning. Evidence that statistical learning may play a role in language development comes from two different sources. Firstly, a number of studies has reported on associations between children's statistical learning ability and different aspects of language (vocabulary size: e.g.,

Grammatical performance in children with dyslexia: the contributions of individual differences in phonological memory and statistical learning

“…Again, please note that the sample is identical to the one described by Van Witteloostuijn et al (2019;, which focuses on group comparisons on statistical learning measures. Similarly, the group of TD children partly overlaps with studies examining language and statistical learning in children with DLD (Lammertink et al, 2020a(Lammertink et al, , 2020b. These previous reports thus have a different focus than this study and there is no overlap in the interpretation of the data.…”

“…Although we are aware that the SRT task is typically considered a sequence learning or procedural learning task, the type of learning that takes place in an SRT task can also be described as statistical: it involves tracking the co-occurrences of adjacent elements (see also, e.g., Kidd, 2012). Both statistical learning measures have previously been related to grammatical performance in children and/or have demonstrated impaired learning ability in children with DLD (SRT: e.g., Clark & Lum, 2017;Kidd, 2012;Lammertink et al, 2020a; A-NADL: e.g., Iao et al, 2017;Lammertink et al, 2020b). Besides phonological memory and statistical learning measures, our regression analysis includes other potential sources of variance in grammatical performance (children's age, gender, and SES, and their scores on measures of nonverbal reasoning, vocabulary, and sustained attention).…”

“…As mentioned in Section "Participants", children in the present study were tested as part of a larger project investigating statistical learning and its relation to language in children with and without dyslexia and DLD (van Witteloostuijn et al, 2019;Lammertink et al, 2019;Lammertink et al, 2020aLammertink et al, , 2020b. The test battery was administered one-on-one by an experimenter in the child's home or school.…”

Neural patterns elicited by lexical processing in adolescents with specific language impairment: support for the procedural deficit hypothesis?

“…There has been considerable debate regarding whether procedural memory impairment is the underlying cause of language deficits in children with SLI [ 7 – 10 , 67 ]. Procedural memory is a type of non-declarative/implicit memory [cf.…”

“…also found that children with SLI showed significant impairments in procedural learning as compared to controls regardless of task modality (e.g., visual versus auditory). Although the focus of research within the PDH theoretical framework has been the identification of procedural memory deficits in SLI and their link to morphology and syntax deficits in these children [ 8 – 10 ], the PDH also predicts deficits for some but not all aspects of lexical processing as well. Specifically, the PDH posits that because procedural memory supports the concatenation and computation of the sequential information, deficits are predicted at the lexical-phonological level which subsequently impacts spoken word recognition, lexical retrieval, and sensitivity to word frequency effects (i.e., faster processing of high-frequency versus low-frequency words) [ 6 ].…”