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

: Mainela-Arnold E, Evans JL

Publisher: CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS

: 2014

: Journal of Child Language

: JOURNAL OF CHILD LANGUAGE

: J CHILD LANG

: 41

: 327

: 351

: 25

: 0305-0009

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000912000736

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.