Spoken word recognition in children with specific language impairment: Effects of imageability and frequency

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) are usually described as having language deficits unrelated to cognitive or sensory impairment. However, recent studies suggest that the notion of spared cognitive ability may be inaccurate. One possible explanation for the cause of the SLI sequelae is a general problem with symbolism, one aspect of which is the mental representation of images.;A lexical-decision task was employed with words that varied in their associations with visual representations and their frequency in English. Fifteen children with SLI ages 8;6-10;11 (;Subjects indicated by pressing a button connected to a computer when they heard a word (GO/NO GO). The stimuli were presented a second time in a simple reaction time task (SRT) with subjects pressing a button as soon as they heard either a word or a pseudoword (GO/GO).;As the imageability and frequency of the stimuli changed from high to low, reaction time (RT) increased for both groups. High frequency/high imageability words had the fastest RT for the groups. Low imageability/low frequency words had the slowest RT. However, only for the SLI group did frequency and imageability interact. The children with SLI were not slower than the NL children in performing the SRT.;The children with SLI in this study did not have modality specific impairments nor did they have generalized response slowing. Their auditory recognition reaction time was directly affected by the sparseness of the lexical input. The combined effects of low imageability and low frequency resulted in lexical items that were sparse in linguistic and imagistic representation. The consequence was burdened lexical processing and therefore a slower RT. Children with SLI may use imagistic information to facilitate lexical processing when a word's linguistic information is underrepresented.