Lexical Representations in Children With SLI: Evidence From a Frequency-Manipulated Gating Task

Abstract

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...

Lexical learning and lexical processing in children with developmental language impairments

“…In all four studies, however, competition effects lurked for longer in individuals with lower levels of language skill. It is worth noting that competition-like differences in children with LI have been described in studies using other methodologies such as semantic priming and lexical ambiguity resolution [65][66][67], gating [68], word spotting [69,70] and delayed repetition [71,72]. Taken together, these observations provide converging evidence and reassurance that prolonged competitor activity is unlikely to be an artefact of the visual world paradigm.…”

The Downside of Greater Lexical Influences: Selectively Poorer Speech Perception in Noise

“…Children with SLI are less effective in ignoring lexical competitors (McMurray, Munson, & Tomblin, 2014;McMurray, Samelson, Lee, & Tomblin, 2010), and more likely to vacillate on their responses when exposed to word fragments with multiple alternative continuations (Mainela-Arnold, Evans, & Coady, 2008). Children with SLI also display greater lexical influences on speech perception than age-matched controls (Schwartz, Scheffler, & Lopez, 2013).…”

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“…Children with primary language impairment have difficulty with many areas of language, including semantics (meaning), syntax (e.g., passives and wh-questions) and morphology (e.g., past tense) [3,4,5,6,7]. …”