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The impact of lexical representations on performance on verbal working memory tasks in children with SLI

Posted on:2006-08-31Degree:Ph.DType:Thesis
University:The University of Wisconsin - MadisonCandidate:Mainela-Arnold, ElinaFull Text:PDF
GTID:2455390005998606Subject:Health Sciences
Abstract/Summary:
A total of 40 children, 20 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and 20 typically developing age matched peers (CA) (ages 8;5--12;3) participated in the studies investigating the hypothesis that children with SLI differ from CA peers on lexical tasks posing low memory demands and that these lexical difficulties also impact these children's performance on working memory tasks. SLI refers to a condition where children exhibit delayed language development in the absence any known cause. Limits in working memory capacity have been proposed as a possible account of SLI. Traditionally, these capacity accounts have viewed processing resources and linguistic representations as separate constructs and have focused on the extent to which capacity limitations result in impairments in linguistic representations. Recently, however, it has been suggested that linguistic knowledge and working memory capacity are primitives that can not vary independently, but processing capacity and language skills are both determined by language input and computational capacity of the child's neural network. Current studies investigated if group differences in lexical representations account for group differences on a sentence span task similar to the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT).; The results from Study 1 suggested that SLI vs. CA group differences in lexical representations in the form of effects of word frequency and neighborhood density in part impact the target word recall in a sentence span task. Group differences related to lexical processing were found for recency and primacy positions of the sentence span.; Studies 2 and 3 were conducted in order to investigate lexical representations in children with SLI and CA peers on two low memory demand tasks, a forward gating task and a repetition naming task. Group differences in the form of disproportionate effects of word frequency and neighborhood density that were different for the two groups were found. The group differences may be partly related to slower tracking of distributional regularities of words in children with SLI during lexical acquisition. Unexpected evidence of vulnerability to competition or lack of inhibition in lexical processing in children with SLI was found even when memory demands of the tasks are low.
Keywords/Search Tags:Children with SLI, Lexical, Memory, Processing, Language, CA peers, Impact, Sentence span task
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