RESUMEN
Declarative memory abilities may be important for children who are learning to read in a second language. In the present study, we investigated declarative memory in a recognition memory task in 7-to-13-year-old, Kannada native-speaking, good (n = 22) and poor (n = 22) readers of English, in Karnataka, India. Recognition memory was tested shortly (â¼10 min) after encoding (day 1) and again on the next (day 2). Analyses revealed that the two groups did not differ in recognition memory performance on day 1. On day 2, the good readers improved from day 1, whereas poor readers did not. A partial correlation analysis suggests that consolidation - the change in performance in recognition memory between the 2 days - is associated with reading skills in good readers, but not in poor readers. Taken together, these results suggest that children who struggle to read in a second language may have deficits in declarative memory consolidation.
RESUMEN
BACKGROUND: Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting language acquisition in the absence of frank neurological damage, hearing deficits, severe environmental deprivation, or mental retardation. Children with SLI have significant difficulties in syntax domain of language compared to semantics, while their acquisition of pragmatics is relatively spared. PURPOSE: The purpose of the present study is to examine the judgment and revision of inflectional and derivational morphemes of children with specific language impairment (SLI). METHODS: 31 children with SLI and 33 typically developing (TD) children participated in the study (age range 8-13 years). The stimuli consisted of 18 sentences with inflectional morphemes and 18 sentences with derivational morphemes for grammatical judgment and revision tasks. Inflectional and derivational performance of SLI group was compared with TD group on judgment and revision scores. RESULTS: Children with SLI were significantly poorer compared to TD children on inflectional operations (invariably on judging & revising) but performed like TD children on derivational morphemes. Within SLI, inflectional performance was significantly poorer than derivational performance. In contrast, TD children performed better on inflections than derivations. Findings supported the predictions and discussed using possible sequencing problems in children with SLI. CONCLUSION: The study describes the findings using sequential difficulties reported by procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH) in SLI.
RESUMEN
Procedural deficit hypothesis claims that language deficit in children with specific language impairment is affiliated to sequence learning problems. However, studies did not explore on aspects of grammar vulnerable to sequence learning deficits. The present study makes predictions for aspects of grammar that could be sensitive to procedural deficits based on core ideas of procedural deficit hypothesis. The hypothesis for the present study was that the grammatical operations that require greater sequencing abilities (such as inflectional operations) would be more affected in children with language impairment. Further, the influence of sequencing difficulties would be even greater in agglutinating inflectional languages. An adapted serial reaction time task for sequence learning measurements along with grammatical tasks on derivation, inflection, and sentence complexity were examined on typically developing and language impaired children. Results were in favor of procedural deficit hypothesis and its close relation to non-adjacent grammatical operations. The findings were discussed using procedural deficits, declarative compensatory mechanism, and statistical learning deficits.
