A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

Do statistical segmentation abilities predict lexical-phonological and lexical-semantic abilities in children with and without SLI?




AuthorsMainela-Arnold E, Evans JL

PublisherCAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS

Publication year2014

JournalJournal of Child Language

Journal name in sourceJOURNAL OF CHILD LANGUAGE

Journal acronymJ CHILD LANG

Volume41

First page 327

Last page351

Number of pages25

ISSN0305-0009

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000912000736


Abstract
This study tested the predictions of the procedural deficit hypothesis by investigating the relationship between sequential statistical learning and two aspects of lexical ability, lexical-phonological and lexical-semantic, in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Participants included forty children (ages 8;5-12;3), twenty children with SLI and twenty with typical development. Children completed Saffran's statistical word segmentation task, a lexical-phonological access task (gating task), and a word definition task. Poor statistical learners were also poor at managing lexical-phonological competition during the gating task. However, statistical learning was not a significant predictor of semantic richness in word definitions. The ability to track statistical sequential regularities may be important for learning the inherently sequential structure of lexical-phonological, but not as important for learning lexical-semantic knowledge. Consistent with the procedural/declarative memory distinction, the brain networks associated with the two types of lexical learning are likely to have different learning properties.



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