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Purpose-This study investigated lexical representations of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing, chronological age-matched (CA) peers on a frequency-manipulated gating task. The study tested the hypothesis that children with SLI have holistic phonological representations of words, that is, that children with SLI would exhibit smaller effects of neighborhood density on gating durations than CA peers and that children with SLI would be as efficient as CA peers in accessing high-frequency words but that they would differ from their age-matched peers in accessing low-frequency words.Method-Thirty-two children (ages 8;5-12;3 [years;months]) participated: 16 children with SLI and 16 typically developing peers matched on age and nonverbal IQ. Children's word guesses after different gating durations were investigated.Results-Contrary to predictions, no group differences in effects of distributional regularity were found: Children in both groups required equally longer acoustic chunks to access words that were low in frequency and came from dense neighborhoods. However, children with SLI appeared to vacillate between multiple word candidates at significantly later gates when compared with children in the CA group.Conclusions-Children with SLI did not exhibit evidence for phonologically holistic lexical representations. Instead, they appeared more vulnerable to competing words. Keywords SLI; lexical representation; word frequency; neighborhood densityThis study investigated lexical access in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing peers on a frequency-manipulated forward gating task. Specific language impairment refers to a developmental condition in which children exhibit difficulty acquiring language in the absence of other neurodevelopmental, frankContact author: Elina Mainela-Arnold, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Pennsylvania State University, 401K Ford Building, University Park, PA 16802-3100. ezm3@psu.edu. HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript neurological, hearing, emotional, or nonverbal intellectual impairments (Leonard, 1998;Tomblin, Records, & Zhang, 1996). Clinically, delayed onset of lexical acquisition is, in most cases, the first indication of SLI, and children with SLI can be differentiated from their typically developing peers on the basis of estimates of vocabulary size, standardized vocabulary tests, and the number of different words produced in spontaneous language samples (Bishop, 1997;Watkins, Kelly, Harbers, & Hollis, 1995).Lexical processes have been shown to be compromised in SLI in many experimental studies. Children with SLI exhibit slower speeds of lexical processing as compared with their peers. They exhibit slower speed of naming Leonard, Nippold, Kail, & Hale, 1983) and slower reaction times in word recognition experiments . Children with SLI also make naming errors, both phonological errors (Lahey & Edwards, 1999) and semantic errors (McGreg...

Purpose-This study investigated potential explanations for sparse lexical-semantic representations in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing peers. The role of auditory perception, phonological working memory and lexical competition were investigated.Method-Participants included 32 children (ages 8;5-12;3), 16 children with SLI and 16 typically developing age-and nonverbal IQ matched peers (CA). Children's word definitions were investigated. The words to be defined were manipulated for phonological neighborhood density. Nonword repetition and two lexical competition measures were tested as predictors of word definition abilities.Results-Children with SLI gave word definitions with fewer content details than children in the CA group. Compared to the CA group, the definitions of children in the SLI group were not disproportionately impacted by phonological neighborhood density. Lexical competition was a significant unique predictor of children's word definitions, but nonword repetition was not.Conclusions-Individual differences in richness of lexical semantic representations as well as differences between children with SLI and typically developing peers may, at least in part, be explained by processes of competition. However, difficulty with auditory perception or phonological working memory does not fully explain difficulties in lexical semantics.

Background Previous research suggests that speakers are especially likely to produce manual communicative gestures when they have relative ease in thinking about the spatial elements of what they are describing, paired with relative difficulty organizing those elements into appropriate spoken language. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit poor expressive language abilities together with within-normal-range nonverbal IQs. Aims This study investigated whether weak spoken language abilities in children with SLI influence their reliance on gestures to express information. We hypothesized that these children would rely on communicative gestures to express information more often than their age-matched typically developing (TD) peers, and that they would sometimes express information in gestures that they do not express in the accompanying speech. Methods & Procedures Participants were 15 children with SLI (aged 5;6–10;0) and 18 age-matched TD controls. Children viewed a wordless cartoon and retold the story to a listener unfamiliar with the story. Children's gestures were identified and coded for meaning using a previously established system. Speech–gesture combinations were coded as redundant if the information conveyed in speech and gesture was the same, and non-redundant if the information conveyed in speech was different from the information conveyed in gesture. Outcomes & Results Children with SLI produced more gestures than children in the TD group; however, the likelihood that speech–gesture combinations were non-redundant did not differ significantly across the SLI and TD groups. In both groups, younger children were significantly more likely to produce non-redundant speech–gesture combinations than older children. Conclusions & Implications The gesture–speech integration system functions similarly in children with SLI and TD, but children with SLI rely more on gesture to help formulate, conceptualize or express the messages they want to convey. This provides motivation for future research examining whether interventions focusing on increasing manual gesture use facilitate language and communication in children with SLI.

The findings support a refined view of working memory and processing speed as separable factors in children's sentence imitation performance. Processing speed does not independently explain sentence imitation accuracy for all sentence types, but contributes when the task requires more mental operations. Processing speed also has an indirect effect on sentence imitation by contributing to working memory capacity.

Purpose-To examine perceptual deficits as a potential underlying cause of specific language impairments (SLI).Method-Twenty-one children with SLI (8;[7][8][9][10][11]11 [years;months]) and 21 age-matched controls participated in categorical perception tasks using four series of syllables for which perceived syllable-initial voicing varied. Series were either words or abstract nonword syllables and either synthesized or high-quality edited natural utterances. Children identified and discriminated (a) digitally edited tokens of naturally spoken "bowl"-"pole", (b) synthesized renditions of "bowl"-"pole", (c) natural "ba"-"pa", and (d) synthetic "ba"-"pa".Results-Identification crossover locations were the same for both groups of children, but there was modestly less accuracy on unambiguous endpoints for children with SLI. Planned comparisons revealed these effects to be limited to synthesized speech. Children with SLI showed overall reduced discrimination, but these effects were limited to abstract nonword syllables.Conclusion-Overall, children with SLI perceived naturally spoken real words comparably to age-matched peers but showed impaired identification and discrimination of synthetic speech and of abstract syllables. Poor performance on speech perception tasks may result from task demands and stimulus properties, not perceptual deficits. Keywordsspecific language impairment; categorical perception; speech perception (C) The American-Speech-Language-Hearing Association is the publisher of this article and holder of the copyright. Further reproduction of this article in violation of copyright is prohibited without the consent of the publisher. To contact the publisher: http:// www.asha.org/ Contact author: Jeffry A. Coady, Sargent College, Boston University, 635 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215. coady@bu.edu. Julia L. Evans is now at the School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University, and Elina MainelaArnold is now at the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Pennsylvania State University. HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript Author ManuscriptThe present investigation was conducted to examine how speech perception abilities of children with specific language impairments (SLI) change as a function of the nature of the tokens with which they are tested. These children have normal hearing and nonverbal intelligence, with no obvious oral-motor or neurological deficits. Nevertheless, they experience difficulty learning language in spite of having all of the requisite cognitive abilities generally considered to support normal language acquisition (see Leonard, 1998, for a review). Although these children do acquire language, they experience deficits in many linguistic areas, including phonology, morphology, and syntax. Among the possible underlying causes that have been considered are deficits in , auditory processing (e.g., Eisenson, 1972). Explanations of these potential processing difficulties range from slower processing acr...

Speakers sometimes express information in gestures that they do not express in speech. In this research, we developed a system that could be used to assess the redundancy of gesture and speech in a narrative task. We then applied this system to examine whether children and adults produce non-redundant gesture–speech combinations at similar rates. The coding system was developed based on a sample of 30 children. A crucial feature of the system is that gesture meanings can be assessed based on form alone; thus, the meanings speakers express in gesture and speech can be assessed independently and compared. We then collected narrative data from a new sample of 17 children (ages 5–10), as well as a sample of 20 adults, and we determined the average proportion of non-redundant gesture–speech combinations produced by individuals in each group. Children produced more non-redundant gesture–speech combinations than adults, both at the clause level and at the word level. These findings suggest that gesture–speech integration is not constant over the life span, but instead appears to change with development.

This study tested the predictions of the procedural deficit hypothesis by investigating the relationship between sequential statistical learning and two aspects of lexical ability, lexical-phonological and lexical-semantic, in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Participants included 40 children (ages 8;5–12;3), 20 children with SLI and 20 with typical development. Children completed Saffran’s statistical word segmentation task, a lexical-phonological access task (gating task), and a word definition task. Poor statistical learners were also poor at managing lexical-phonological competition during the gating task. However, statistical learning was not a significant predictor of semantic richness in word definitions. The ability to track statistical sequential regularities may be important for learning the inherently sequential structure of lexical-phonology, but not as important for learning lexical-semantic knowledge. Consistent with the procedural/declarative memory distinction, the brain networks associated with the two types of lexical learning are likely to have different learning properties.