These results support the notion of attention difficulties in preschool children with SLI and suggest separate attentional capacities for different stimulus modalities.

The lower performance of children with SLI relative to TD children on nonverbal IQ tests has theoretical implications for the characterization of SLI and clinical and political implications regarding how nonverbal cognitive tests are used and interpreted for children with this disorder.

These results identify suppression weaknesses in preschool-age children with SLI. Specifically, children with this disorder exhibited difficulty suppressing both irrelevant and contradictory information.

No abstract

We investigated whether preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit the shape bias in word learning: the bias to generalize based on shape rather than size, color, or texture in an object naming context ('This is a wek; find another wek') but not in a non-naming similarity classification context ('See this? Which one goes with this one?'). Fifty-four preschool children (16 with SLI, 16 children with typical language [TL] in an equated control group, and 22 additional children with TL included in individual differences analyses but not group comparisons) completed a battery of linguistic and cognitive assessments and two experiments. In Experiment 1, children made generalization choices in object naming and similarity classification contexts on separate days, from options similar to a target object in shape, color, or texture. On average, TL children exhibited the shape bias in an object naming context, but children with SLI did not. In Experiment 2, we tested whether the failure to exhibit the shape bias might be linked to ability to detect systematicities in the visual domain. Experiment 2 supported this hypothesis, in that children with SLI failed to learn simple paired visual associations that were readily learned by children with TL. Analyses of individual differences in the two studies revealed that visual paired-associate learning predicted degree of shape bias in children with SLI and TL better than any other measure of nonverbal intelligence or standard assessments of language ability. We discuss theoretical and clinical implications.