Non‐word repetition and language development in children with specific language impairment (SLI)

Abstract

Non-word repetition has previously been found to correlate with language outcomes both in children who are language impaired and in those who are developing normally. This paper concerns a group of children identified as having specific language impairment (SLI) and follows the methods of Adams and Gathercole (2000) by taking children with the highest and the lowest non-word repetition scores at age 11. These children's language and literacy abilities were then compared. Despite the fact that high and low scorers were matched on Performance IQ tasks (Block Design and Picture Completion), all linguistic measures except for vocabulary assessments showed significant differences between the groups. The fact that these differences were present despite block design scores being identical for the two groups suggests that more than a general working memory deficit underlies the language difficulties. Furthermore, significant differences were noted on a digit-span task requiring processing and production of number words. A specific phonological memory difficulty may therefore be present over and above a subtle but more general processing limitation. The implications for SLI theory and practice are discussed.

Phonological working memory in Spanish–English bilingual children with and without specific language impairment

“…For example, sentence comprehension was not correlated with non-word repetition for children (6;4 to 10;5) with SLI or their typically developing peers (Montgomery, 2004). Subgroups of older children with SLI (10;11) who had the highest and the lowest nonword repetition scores differed in reading and reading comprehension, but not in their receptive or expressive vocabulary scores (Botting & Conti-Ramsden, 2001). In contrast, several studies have revealed a relationship between receptive vocabulary and non-word repetition in younger children with TLD (Metsala, 1999;Roy & Chiat, 2004).…”

Specific Language Impairment is not Specific to Language: the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis

“…Working memory impairments. SLI is strongly linked to working memory impairments (Botting and Conti-Ramsden, 2001;Fazio, 1996Fazio, , 1998Gathercole and Baddeley, 1993;Kirchner and Klatzky, 1985;Montgomery, 1995aMontgomery, , 1995bMontgomery, 2000Montgomery, , 2003Sininger et al, 1989;Weismer, 1996). In one study children with SLI took almost four times as long to scan a sequence of items in short-term memory (measured by response speed on a Sternberg task) as compared to control children (Sininger et al, 1989).…”

“…In addition, non-word repetition, a task whose performance is highly dependent on phonological working memory, and requires the maintenance of a sequence of phonological segments, is notoriously difficult for children with SLI (see above). Intriguingly, non-word repetition has been found to correlate, across subjects, with performance at several tasks probing grammatical processing: sentence repetition (Bishop et al, 1996;Kamhi and Catts, 1986), past tense and third person singular production tasks (Botting and Conti-Ramsden, 2001), and a test of receptive grammar (Botting and Conti-Ramsden, 2001). Similarly, other measures of working memory abilities have also been found to correlate with performance at sentence comprehension (Montgomery, 2000).…”

“…First, the repetition of non-words, as compared to real words, is a notoriously difficult task for children with SLI (Montgomery, 1995b;Bishop et al, 1996;Botting and Conti-Ramsden, 2001;Edwards and Lahey, 1998;Gathercole and Baddeley, 1993;Weismer et al, 2000). In fact, this pattern, which suggests phonological processing difficulties and/or deficits of phonological working memory (Montgomery, 1995a;Edwards and Lahey, 1998; Gathercole and Baddeley, 1990; Kamhi and Catts, 1986), has even been claimed to be a behavioral indicator or diagnostic marker for language impairment (Gray, 2003;Bishop et al, 1996;Conti-Ramsden et al, 2001). Second, a study of the KE family documented that the affected subjects acquired the phonological inventory of English at an extremely delayed rate, and never achieved the competence of adults at reproducing complex syllable patterns (Fee, 1995).…”

Predicting foreign-accent adaptation in older adults

“…Others have referred to this task as indexing phonological storage (e.g., Gathercole, 2006), phonological buffer capacity (Bates et al, 2011), or phonological working memory (Gathercole, Willis, Baddeley, & Emslie, 1994;McGettigan et al, 2011). The task has been widely used in research on developmental dyslexia (e.g., Ramus & Szenkovits, 2008) and specific language impairment (Botting & Conti-Ramsden, 2001). …”