Interactions between working memory and language in young children with specific language impairment (SLI)

Abstract

The underlying structure of working memory (WM) in young children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) was examined. The associations between the components of WM and the language abilities of young children with SLI were then analyzed. The Automated Working Memory Assessment and four linguistic tasks were administered to 58 children with SLI and 58 children without SLI, aged 4-5 years. The WM of the children was best represented by a model with four separate but interacting components of verbal storage, visuospatial storage, verbal central executive (CE), and visuospatial CE. The associations between the four components of WM did not differ significantly for the two groups of children. However, the individual components of WM showed varying associations with the language abilities of the children with SLI. The verbal CE component of WM was moderately to strongly associated with all the language abilities in children with SLI: receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, verbal comprehension, and syntactic development. These results show verbal CE to be involved in a wide range of linguistic skills; the limited ability of young children with SLI to simultaneously store and process verbal information may constrain their acquisition of linguistic skills. Attention should thus be paid to the language problems of children with SLI, but also to the WM impairments that can contribute to their language problems.

Picture naming in typically developing and language-impaired children: the role of sustained attention

“…, Vugs et al . ). Some researchers have therefore suggested that domain‐general deficits are the underlying cause of SLI or significantly contribute to it (e.g., Bishop , Kail , Leonard et al .…”

“…This led many researchers to propose deficits in linguistic knowledge to explain SLI (e.g., Gopnik and Crago 1991, Novogrodsky and Friedmann 2006, Rice and Wexler 1996, Van der Lely 2005. However, several more recent studies have reported deficits in other cognitive domains such as attention and memory (e.g., Henry et al 2012, Im-Bolter et al 2006, Marton et al 2007, Vugs et al 2015. Some researchers have therefore suggested that domain-general deficits are the underlying cause of SLI or significantly contribute to it (e.g., Bishop 1992, Kail 1994, Leonard et al 2007, Ullman and Pierpont 2005.…”

The role of nonverbal working memory in morphosyntactic processing by children with specific language impairment and autism spectrum disorders

“…Some studies have reported no significant limitations in nonverbal WM in SLI [5, 6], whereas other studies have found visuospatial WM deficits in children with SLI [40–44], including a meta-analysis of 21 studies that included complex (central executive) visuospatial WM tasks [45]. Recent research using latent variable analysis found that the underlying structure of WM was similar for children with and without SLI, with the different components of WM showing varying associations with language abilities [46]. The bulk of the findings indicate that when difficulties with visuospatial WM abilities are observed in SLI, the effects are less robust than in the case for verbal WM [45].…”

“…Previous research has demonstrated a clear link between WM and language abilities in SLI [46, 67, 68], with stronger links observed for verbal than for nonverbal WM. Studies have demonstrated associations between verbal WM capacity and complex sentence comprehension [13, 68] and the effect of morphological/syntactic complexity on WM performance [69, 70].…”

Vocabulário e memória de curto prazo verbal em pré-escolares prematuros sem risco neurológico

“…A memória de curto prazo verbal mantém relação direta com a aquisição e a compreensão da linguagem, estando envolvida no aprendizado lexical, morfossintático e funcional, e na compreensão de pequenas sentenças até narrativas (9,50,55,56) .…”