Bilingualism and Procedural Learning in Typically Developing Children and Children With Language Impairment

Abstract

Procedural learning does not appear to be modified by language experience, supporting the notion that it is a child-intrinsic language learning mechanism that is minimally malleable to experience.

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

“…The task that we used was based on the one used by Lum and Kidd (2012). Lum and Kidd did not compare serial reaction time task performance between children with and without DLD, but task designs similar to the set-up of their task (see Introduction) have been used to assess the presence of a visuomotoric statistical learning deficit in children with DLD (Clark & Lum, 2017;Conti-Ramsden et al, 2015;Hsu & Bishop, 2014;Park et al, 2018). Unexpectedly, we observed that both groups of children were sensitive to the structural regularities, and we found no evidence for or against a difference in sensitivity between children with and without DLD.…”

“…our conceptual replication) of the present study, we use a serial reaction time that is based on the one used by Lum and Kidd (2012, for differences between our task and the task of Lum and Kidd, see Materials section). We decided to work with this serial reaction time task as the design of this task is comparable, in terms of the sequence type used (first-order conditional) and the block structure used (structured versus random blocks), to serial reaction time tasks that are commonly used to assess the presence of a visuomotor statistical learning deficit in children with DLD (e.g., Clark & Lum, 2017;Conti-Ramsden et al, 2015;Hsu & Bishop, 2014;Park et al, 2018). Thus, our experimental study can be seen as a conceptual replication of earlier work on the presence of a visuomotoric statistical learning deficit in children with DLD.…”

“…Amongst other things, these tasks differ in what grammatical structures they target, and also in their assessment of children's receptive grammatical proficiency or expressive grammatical proficiency. For example, some of the studies included in our meta-analysis focused on a specific grammatical structure, such as past-tense production (e.g., Lum & Kidd, 2012;Mimeau et al, 2016) whereas others used broader tasks of grammatical proficiency, such as the sentence recall task from the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF; Semel et al, 2010) test battery (e.g., Hani, 2015;Obeid, 2017;Park et al, 2018).…”

“…This also meant that we eventually had to exclude Desmottes, Meulemans et al (2017), because they only reported a SRT-Grammar correlation for the children's third SRT session. In the case of solution (b), we computed (or obtained) a synthesized (combined) effect size, and its associated synthesized variance (formulas D and E; Borenstein et al, 2009, p. 227;Desmottes et al, 2016a;Desmottes, Maillart et al, 2017;Kidd, 2012;Kidd & Kirjavainen, 2011;Obeid, 2017;Park et al, 2018). The resulting synthesized effect sizes are reported in Table 3.…”

“…The calculation of these synthesized effect sizes required knowledge of the correlation between the different measures of expressive grammar. For Kidd (2012), Park et al (2018) and for Obeid (2017), we obtained these correlations from the authors (see our OSF page). Unfortunately, we did not obtain this information for the Desmottes et al (2016a) and Desmottes, Maillart et al (2017) papers.…”