Practice schedule and testing per se affect children's transfer abilities in a grapho-motor task.

Children's ability to transfer the gains of a motor experience, such as learning to write a letter, to novel conditions, such as cursive writing of the same letter, are affected by the way in which the learning experience is parsed. Parsing may have limitations because a short session may hamper the engagement of procedural memory consolidation processes. Here, we compared the effects of two practice schedules with the total amount of practice identical training provided in a single-session practice versus multi-session practice, wherein each session on its own was insufficient for generating long-term gains. A total of 40 7- and 8-year-old children practiced the production of a novel letter form by connecting dots, namely, the Invented Letter Task (ILT). Multiple ILT-related transfer tasks were assessed at 24 h post-training and again at 4-5 weeks post-training. Although by the end of training the single-session practice group outperformed the multi-session practice group in speed and accuracy, at 24 h post-training both groups showed comparable gains. However, after multi-session practice, children were as fast or faster and more accurate in the transfer tasks. By 4-5 weeks post-training, the multi-session practice group showed larger gains in the trained condition, a speed advantage in the transfer tasks, and a significant improvement on the transfer tasks. The results suggest that parsing training over several brief sessions may lead to long-term gains in children's grapho-motor skills. Moreover, multi-session practice protocols may contribute to the potential for transfer and to more effective learning from experiences such as transfer tasks.

Long-term benefits after a rhyme-repetition based intervention program for kindergarteners: Better reading and spelling in the first grade.

Oral language proficiency in kindergarten can facilitate the acquisition of reading and writing. However, in diglossic languages, like Arabic, the large gap between the spoken and the formal, modern standard (MSA) varieties of the language may restrict the benefits of oral language proficiency to subsequent literacy skills. Here, we tested, in a randomized controlled study, whether an intervention program, implemented in kindergarten, that familiarized the children with rhymes presented in MSA through recitation, facilitated reading and spelling in first grade. We also tested whether engaging the children in recitation affords an advantage over repeated listening by itself and whether rhymes directly referring to the alphabet impart additional advantages. The children were assigned to one of four intervention conditions (10 sessions, 2 months) wherein they either recited or repeatedly listened to nursery rhymes that were either related or unrelated to the alphabet, or engaged in nonlinguistic activities (control). A year later, all intervention groups read faster compared to a control group (nonlinguistic activity). The two recitation groups gained in reading accuracy, reading efficiency, and spelling; spelling gains were found also in children who only listened to alphabet-related rhymes. The reciting groups were superior to the listening groups in all study measures (reading and spelling). The results suggest long-term contributions from structured interventions based on oral rhyme repetition, in kindergarten, to reading and spelling in first grade. Vocal recitations in kindergarten can benefit the mastering of literacy skills even in a language that differs from the one spoken in the child's home. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Second Graders' Grapho-Motor Skill Learning and Verbal Learning: The Effects of Socio-Educational Factors.

Introduction: Children from low socioeconomic status (SES) families, and in particular, those with a lower level of maternal education, show lower fine-motor skills and lower vocabulary scores than their SES peers whose mothers have a higher level of education. Furthermore, low SES children frequently have difficulties in reading and spelling. These difficulties are attributed to deficits in the acquisition of skills through practice, such as those required for developing visual-motor routines, alongside deficits in the intentional acquisition of knowledge, such as those required in verbal learning. The aim of the current study was to test the effect of two background factors: low maternal education (ME) and risk of reading and spelling difficulties on practice-dependent learning of a motor task and intentional learning of a verbal task in second graders from low SES families. Methods: In 2016/17, 134 low-SES second graders with higher and lower ME (95 typical learners and 39 with reading and spelling difficulties) were assessed with (a) the Invented Letter Task (ILT; a grapho-motor skill learning task) across five time-points (initial- and end-training Day 1; initial- and end-training Day 2; and 2-weeks post-training), as well as an ILT transfer task; and (b) The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT; an intentional word-learning task in which a word list is read to children for five learning trials and is recalled 20 min later). Findings: Lower ME was associated with surplus segments in the performance of the motor task and its transfer to a novel condition as well as with lower recall on the verbal task, but not with the learning of both the motor and the verbal task. Having reading and spelling difficulties affected motor-task accuracy and also the way children learned the task, as evidenced by surplus segments at the beginning of Day 2, which were reduced with further practice. Conclusion: Low ME affected overall performance level. Reading and spelling difficulties resulted in atypical learning of the motor task. Future research on practice-dependent learning in the context of children coming from low SES families should focus on subgroups within this heterogeneous population.

Cognitive flexibility in children with Developmental Language Disorder: Drawing of nonexistent objects.

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adapt thoughts and behaviors to new environments. Previous studies investigating cognitive flexibility in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) present contradictory findings. In the current study, cognitive flexibility was assessed in 5- and 6-year-old preschoolers with DLD (n = 23) and peers with typical development (TD; n = 50) using a nonexistent object drawing (NEOD) task. The children were asked to draw a nonexistent man and a nonexistent house. The children with DLD did not differ from their peers with TD on simple category changes, which were comprised of changes in the size or shape of parts of the object, change of the whole shape of the object, and deletion of parts of the object. Nevertheless, children with DLD made fewer more complex, high-level category changes, which included same-category insertions, position exchange of object's parts, and cross-category insertions. The difference between DLD and TD on high-level category changes was related to differences between the two groups in verbal short-term memory and inhibition. Furthermore, children with DLD made no changes to their original drawings of an existing man and house more often than their peers with TD. It is concluded that children with DLD aged 5-6 years show less flexibility on the NEOD task than age-matched children with TD. This difference in cognitive flexibility may be related to lower levels of verbal short-term memory and inhibition ability of children with DLD, or to different use of these cognitive skills on the NEOD task.

Verbal and Figural Creativity in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typical Development.

Previous studies have shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate lower performance on creativity tasks. Yet, recent findings suggest that individuals with ASD are not necessarily impaired in verbal creativity, as measured by the novel metaphor generation task. The current study investigates verbal and figural creativity in 40 children with ASD (aged 11-14 years) and 39 peers with typical development (TD) (aged 11-15 years). We also tested the contribution of executive functions to the creative performance. A sentence completion questionnaire was used to test creative verbal generation, while a task of drawing non-existent objects was used to assess figural abilities. The results indicate that children with ASD generated a greater quantity of creative metaphors and showed greater use of a specific kind of representational change on the figural creativity task: cross-category insertions (e.g., a house with a tail). However, no correlation was found between the metaphor generation task and the use of cross-category insertions for either group. Results also showed that, whereas phonemic fluency contributed to the explained variance in novel metaphor generation in the ASD group, fluid intelligence, although only marginally, contributed to variance in novel metaphor generation in the TD group. These findings suggest that verbal creativity and figural creativity are two separate abilities relying on different cognitive resources. Our results show that those with ASD and TD differ in the cognitive abilities they use to perform the metaphor generation task. The research points to a unique creative cognition profile among children with ASD.

Recitation and listening to nursery rhymes in the familiarization with a literacy language in kindergarteners: Not kids' stuff.

A large linguistic distance exists between spoken Arabic and the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) the literary language (a diglosia). Novice readers, therefore, struggle with the complex orthography of Arabic as well as the mastering of MSA. Here, we tested whether structured activities in MSA would advance kindergarteners' MSA aptitude by the end of the school year. We examined two issues: (a) whether reciting nursery rhymes in MSA would be more effective in promoting language and preliteracy skills in kindergarteners compared to listening to the same texts, and (b) whether there are additional advantages for using texts directly referring to the alphabet. Thus, 136 kindergarteners (Mage = 5:6; 61 girls), all native speakers of Arabic and with middle-low socioeconomic background, were assigned to a 10-session (2 months) program in 1 of 4 intervention conditions wherein nursery rhymes related/not related to the alphabet, were either repeatedly recited or listened to. The achievements of children in the intervention conditions were compared to those of peers that were given nonlinguistic activity of similar length (control). The four intervention groups improved their performance at the postintervention assessment in all tests of MSA aptitude and outperformed the control group in receptive and expressive vocabulary and listening comprehension. Also, the reciting groups were better than the control and listening groups in tests assessing vocabulary and morpho-syntactic sensitivity. Our results highlight the contribution of structured interventions based on rhyme repetition to MSA proficiency of kindergarteners. Moreover, the results suggest that reciting may be superior to listening in advancing language proficiency in preschoolers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Motor skill learning with impaired transfer by children with developmental coordination disorder.

BACKGROUND: DSM-5 criteria for developmental coordination disorder (DCD) emphasize deficits in the acquisition and execution of coordinated motor skills. Previous studies of motor skill learning in DCD suggest deficits in the execution of motor skills but do not reveal a deficit in learning new skills, possibly because of the heterogeneity of motor deficits in DCD. AIM: In light of the high prevalence of handwriting difficulties among children with DCD, the current study compared motor skill learning in 5-6-year-old children with DCD and their peers using a grapho-motor learning task that resembles a letter-writing practice. METHODS: Thirty-two boys, 16 with DCD, learned to produce a new "letter" formed by connecting three dots. Training, following-day consolidation, 1-week post-training retention, and far-transfer to a no-dot condition were tested. RESULTS: Children with DCD exhibited rates of learning similar to those of their peers, but with overall poorer performance, replicating previous findings. Contrary to reports of intact skill transfer following a consolidation period in DCD, impaired transfer of the learned symbol was observed. CONCLUSIONS: These findings may explain some of the motor difficulties experienced by children with DCD as well as contribute to the discussion on mechanisms involved in skill learning in these children.

'MusiMath' and 'Academic Music' - Two music-based intervention programs for fractions learning in fourth grade students.

Music and mathematics require abstract thinking and using symbolic notations. Controversy exists regarding transfer from musical training to math achievements. The current study examined the effect of two integrated intervention programs representing holistic versus acoustic approaches, on fraction knowledge. Three classes of fourth graders attended 12 lessons on fractions: One class attended the 'MusiMath' holistic program (n = 30) focusing on rhythm within the melody. Another class attended the 'Academic Music' acoustic program (Courey et al., Educ Stud Math 81:251, 2012) (n = 25) which uses rhythm only. The third class received regular fraction lessons (comparison group, n = 22). Students in both music programs learned to write musical notes and perform rhythmic patterns through clapping and drumming as part of their fraction lessons. They worked toward adding musical notes to produce a number (fraction), and created addition/subtraction problems with musical notes. The music programs used a 4/4 time signature with whole, half, quarter and eighth notes. In the math lessons, the students learned the analogy between musical durations and 12,14,18 fractions, but also practiced fractions other than 12,14,18 . Music and math were assessed before, immediately following, and 3- and 6-months post-intervention. Pre- to post-intervention analyses indicated that only the 'MusiMath' group showed greater transfer to intervention-trained and untrained fractions than the comparison group. The 'Academic Music' group showed a trend on trained fractions. Although both music groups outperformed the comparison group 3- and 6-months post-intervention on trained fractions, only the 'MusiMath' group demonstrated greater gains in untrained fractions. Gains were more evident in trained than in untrained fractions. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/uJ_KWWDO624.

Different post-training processes in children's and adults' motor skill learning.

Do young children and adults share similar underlying motor skill learning mechanisms? Past studies have shown that school-aged children's speed of performance developed over wake periods of a few hours post-training. Such training-dependent gains were not found in adults. In the current study of children as young as 5-years-old and young adults who practiced a simple grapho-motor task, this finding was replicated only by the children that showed faster performance a few hours post-training. These positive gains in performance speed were retained two weeks later. Furthermore, among the children, variations in gains attained a few hours post-training were associated with initial performance level. These behavioral findings indicate different underlying post-training processes in children's and adults' motor skill learning thus, supporting differential tutoring of skills.

Motor memory consolidation processes in young female adults with ADHD may be less susceptible to interference.

Young adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) may have an atypical procedural ("how to") memory consolidation phase, after practicing a movement sequence, with smaller gains in speed and some costs in accuracy, compared to typical peers, at 24h post-training. Here we tested the susceptibility of performance gains retained after motor practice by young female adults with (N=16) and without (N=16) ADHD to post-training interference. Participants were trained on the finger-to-thumb opposition sequence learning task with performance speed and accuracy recorded before training, immediately after, and at 24h post-training. Two hour after the initial training, participants practiced a second, similarly constructed but differently ordered sequence of movements. Typical young adults showed a significant interference effect, with only the performance of the second sequence showing robust gains in speed, with no costs in accuracy, in the 24h post-training consolidation phase. Participants with ADHD showed only small additional speed gains in the post-training consolidation phase but for both sequences. Altogether these results suggest that motor memory consolidation processes in young adults with ADHD may be less susceptible to interference compared to typical peers.

Time for considering constraints on procedural memory consolidation processes: Comment on Pan and Rickard (2015) with specific reference to developmental changes.

In the acquisition of some motor skills, sleep may be necessary for the completion of procedural memory consolidation processes, as expressed in delayed "offline" performance gains. Pan and Rickard (2015) conducted an original meta-analysis of the literature on performing an explicitly instructed finger movement sequence and tested the role of sleep versus wake in the enhancement of performance over posttraining delay periods. In this comment we propose that a more-biological, process-oriented framework is needed, allowing for more than a yes-no answer to the question addressed, and suggest methodological issues that may affect the target meta-analysis. We argue that different task demands, task conditions, and developmental differences should be considered a priori rather than expected to emerge from pooled data. For example, several recent studies have indicated that there is a qualitative change in the time course of procedural memory consolidation processes at puberty, between the ages of 12 and 17. Before puberty, consolidation processes are reflected in enhancement of task performance over sleep and wake periods alike. In their extensive set of relevant empirical data the authors included a number of developmental studies comparing children with adults (expecting "child status" effects) but did not fully consider developmental changes. We show that the inclusion of the 6 studies of childhood, comprising 13 groups, biases the meta-analysis toward the conclusion that skill enhancement is similar across wake and sleep periods. (PsycINFO Database Record

A Developmental Perspective in Learning the Mirror-Drawing Task.

Is there late maturation of skill learning? This notion has been raised to explain an adult advantage in learning a variety of tasks, such as auditory temporal-interval discrimination, locomotion adaptation, and drawing visually-distorted spatial patterns (mirror-drawing, MD). Here, we test this assertion by following the practice of the MD task in two 5 min daily sessions separated by a 10 min break, over the course of 2 days, in 5-6-year-old kindergarten children, 7-8-year-old second-graders, and young adults. In the MD task, participants were required to trace a square while looking at their hand only as a reflection in a mirror. Kindergarteners did not show learning of the visual-motor mapping, and on average, did not produce even one full side of a square correctly. Second-graders showed increased online movement control with longer strokes, and robust learning of the visual-motor mapping, resulting in a between-day increase in the number of correctly drawn sides with no loss in accuracy. Overall, kindergarteners and second-graders producing at least one correct polygon-side on Day 1 were more likely to improve their performance between days. Adults showed better performance with improvements in the number of correctly drawn sides between- and within-days, and in accuracy between days. It has been suggested that 5-year-olds cannot learn the task due to their inability to detect and encapsulate previously produced accurate movements. Our findings suggest, instead, that these children lacked initial, accurate performance that could be enhanced through training. Recently, it has been shown that in a simple grapho-motor task the three age-groups improved their speed of performance within a session and between-days, while maintaining accuracy scores. Taken together, these data suggest that children's motor skill learning depends on the task's characteristics and their adopting an efficient and mature performance strategy enabling initial success that can be improved through training.

The consolidation of a motor skill in young adults with ADHD: Shorter practice can be better.

Practice on a given sequence of movements can lead to robust procedural memory (skill). In young adults, in addition to gains in performance accrued during practice, speed and accuracy can further improve overnight; the latter, delayed, 'offline', gains are thought to emerge when procedural memory consolidation processes are completed. A recent study suggested that female college students with ADHD show an atypical procedural memory consolidation phase, specifically, gaining speed but losing accuracy, overnight. Here, to test if this accuracy loss reflected a cost of overlong training in adults with ADHD, we compared the performance of female college students with (N=16) and without (N=16) ADHD, both groups given a shorter training protocol (80 rather than the standard 160 task repetitions). Speed and accuracy were recorded before training, immediately after, and at 24-h and 2 weeks post-training. The shortened practice session resulted in as robust within-session gains and additional overnight gains in speed at no costs in accuracy, in both groups. Moreover, individuals with ADHD showed as robust speed gains and retention as in the longer training session, but the costs in accuracy incurred in the latter were eliminated. The shortening of practice sessions may benefit motor skill acquisition in ADHD.

Learning of a simple grapho-motor task by young children and adults: similar acquisition but age-dependent retention.

Many new skills are acquired during early childhood. Typical laboratory skill learning tasks are not applicable for developmental studies that involve children younger than 8 years of age. It is not clear whether young children and adults share a basic underlying skill learning mechanism. In the present study, the learning and retention of a simple grapho-motor pattern were studied in three age groups: 5-6, 7-8, and 19-29 years. Each block of the task consists of identical patterns arranged in a spaced writing array. Progression across the block involves on-page movements while producing the pattern, and off-page movements between patterns. The participants practiced the production of the pattern using a digitizing tablet and were tested at 24 h and 2 weeks post-practice. All age groups produced the task blocks more quickly with practice, and the learning rate was inversely related to the initial production time. All groups exhibited additional gains 24 h post-practice that were well-retained 2 weeks later. The accuracy of the participants was maintained throughout the 2-weeks period. These findings suggest that young children and young adults use a similar mechanism when learning the task. Nevertheless, the 6-years-old spent more time off-page during retention testing than when tested at 24 h post-practice, thus supporting the notion that an age advantage may exists in the long-term retention of skills due to planning-dependent aspects.

Learning, forgetting, and relearning: skill learning in children with language impairment.

PURPOSE: The current study tested whether the difficulties of children with specific language impairment (SLI) in skill acquisition are related to learning processes that occur while practicing a new skill or to the passage of time between practice and later performance. METHOD: The acquisition and retention of a new complex grapho-motor symbol were studied in 5-year-old children with SLI and peers matched for age and nonverbal IQ. The children practiced the production of the symbol for 4 consecutive days. Retention testing took place 10 days later. RESULTS: Children with SLI began each practice day slower than their peers but attained similar levels of performance by its end. Although they increased their performance speed within sessions more than their peers, they did not retain their learning as well between sessions. The loss in speed was largest in the 10-day retention interval. They were also less accurate, but accuracy differences decreased over time. Between-session group differences in speed could not fully be accounted for based on fine motor skills. CONCLUSIONS: In spite of effective within-session learning, children with SLI did not retain the new skill well. The deficit may be attributed to task forgetting in the presence of delayed consolidation processes.

A matter of time: rapid motor memory stabilization in childhood.

Are children better than adults in acquiring new skills ('how-to' knowledge) because of a difference in skill memory consolidation? Here we tested the proposal that, as opposed to adults, children's memories for newly acquired skills are immune to interference by subsequent experience. The establishment of long-term memory for a trained movement sequence in adults requires a phase of memory consolidation. This results in substantial delayed, 'offline', performance gains, which nevertheless remain susceptible to interference by subsequent competing motor experience for several hours after training, unless sleep is afforded in the interval. Here we compared the gains attained overnight (delayed gains) by 9-year-olds and adults after training on a novel finger-to-thumb movement sequence, with and without subsequent interference by repeating a different movement sequence. Our results show that, in 9-year-olds, but not in adults, an interval of 15 min. between the training session and interfering experience sufficed to ensure the expression of delayed, consolidation phase, gains. Nevertheless, in the 9-year-olds, as well as in adults, the gains attained with no interference were significantly larger. Altogether, our results show that while the behavioral expressions of childhood and adult consolidation processes are similar, procedural memory stabilizes, in the waking state, at a much faster rate in children. We propose that, in children, rapid stabilization is a mechanism whereby the constraints on consolidating new experiences into long-term procedural memory are relaxed at the cost of selectivity.

The effect of a skipped dose (placebo) of methylphenidate on the learning and retention of a motor skill in adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have difficulties in achieving optimal performance in many everyday and academic tasks, deficits attributed to impaired skill acquisition and procedural memory consolidation. We tested the effect of a skipped dose of methylphenidate (MPH) on learning a movement sequence and its subsequent consolidation into procedural memory in adolescents with ADHD. A crossover double-blind design with placebo was used. Sixteen male adolescents, 16-18 years-old, with ADHD and taking MPH formulations on a daily basis, were trained on performing a 5-element sequence of finger-to-thumb opposition movements. Participants took part in two study conditions, 2 months apart. In each condition a different movement sequence was trained and tested. Participants trained on the task either with active medication or placebo on the day of training, crossed-over between study conditions. Learning effects, speed and accuracy, were assessed within-session, during a 24-h memory consolidation phase. Retention was tested by 2 weeks post-training. There were robust gains in performance both within-session and during the 24-h consolidation phase, in both conditions. However, the discontinuation of MPH on the day of training significantly reduced performance speed, with no loss of accuracy. By 2 weeks, post-training performance was comparable. Adolescents with ADHD who are treated daily but skip a dose of MPH show significant slowing of performance relative to their own performance on medication. However, on a background of daily treatment a skipped dose has no deleterious effect on memory consolidation and retention.

Sequence specific motor performance gains after memory consolidation in children and adolescents.

Memory consolidation for a trained sequence of finger opposition movements, in 9- and 12-year-old children, was recently found to be significantly less susceptible to interference by a subsequent training experience, compared to that of 17-year-olds. It was suggested that, in children, the experience of training on any sequence of finger movements may affect the performance of the sequence elements, component movements, rather than the sequence as a unit; the latter has been implicated in the learning of the task by adults. This hypothesis implied a possible childhood advantage in the ability to transfer the gains from a trained to the reversed, untrained, sequence of movements. Here we report the results of transfer tests undertaken to test this proposal in 9-, 12-, and 17-year-olds after training in the finger-to-thumb opposition sequence (FOS) learning task. Our results show that the performance gains in the trained sequence partially transferred from the left, trained hand, to the untrained hand at 48-hours after a single training session in the three age-groups tested. However, there was very little transfer of the gains from the trained to the untrained, reversed, sequence performed by either hand. The results indicate sequence specific post-training gains in FOS performance, as opposed to a general improvement in performance of the individual, component, movements that comprised both the trained and untrained sequences. These results do not support the proposal that the reduced susceptibility to interference, in children before adolescence, reflects a difference in movement syntax representation after training.

Grammar predicts procedural learning and consolidation deficits in children with Specific Language Impairment.

The Procedural Deficit Hypothesis (PDH) posits that Specific Language Impairment (SLI) can be largely explained by abnormalities of brain structures that subserve procedural memory. The PDH predicts impairments of procedural memory itself, and that such impairments underlie the grammatical deficits observed in the disorder. Previous studies have indeed reported procedural learning impairments in SLI, and have found that these are associated with grammatical difficulties. The present study extends this research by examining consolidation and longer-term procedural sequence learning in children with SLI. The Alternating Serial Reaction Time (ASRT) task was given to children with SLI and typically developing (TD) children in an initial learning session and an average of three days later to test for consolidation and longer-term learning. Although both groups showed evidence of initial sequence learning, only the TD children showed clear signs of consolidation, even though the two groups did not differ in longer-term learning. When the children were re-categorized on the basis of grammar deficits rather than broader language deficits, a clearer pattern emerged. Whereas both the grammar impaired and normal grammar groups showed evidence of initial sequence learning, only those with normal grammar showed consolidation and longer-term learning. Indeed, the grammar-impaired group appeared to lose any sequence knowledge gained during the initial testing session. These findings held even when controlling for vocabulary or a broad non-grammatical language measure, neither of which were associated with procedural memory. When grammar was examined as a continuous variable over all children, the same relationships between procedural memory and grammar, but not vocabulary or the broader language measure, were observed. Overall, the findings support and further specify the PDH. They suggest that consolidation and longer-term procedural learning are impaired in SLI, but that these impairments are specifically tied to the grammatical deficits in the disorder. The possibility that consolidation and longer-term learning are problematic in the disorder suggests a locus of potential study for therapeutic approaches. In sum, this study clarifies our understanding of the underlying deficits in SLI, and suggests avenues for further research.

Delayed motor skill acquisition in kindergarten children with language impairment.

The acquisition and consolidation of a new grapho-motor symbol into long-term memory was studied in 5-year-old children with language impairment (LI) and peers matched for age and visual-motor integration skills. The children practiced the production of a new symbol and were tested 24h and two weeks post-practice day. Differences in performance speed emerged between the groups: children with LI showed a later onset of rapid learning in the practice phase, and only the comparison group exhibited delayed, consolidation, gains 24h post-training. At two weeks post-training, children with LI improved, closing the gap in performance speed. Speed-accuracy trade-off was characteristic of speed improvements in LI. These results indicate atypical and delayed acquisition in children with LI, and support the view that deficient skill acquisition in LI goes beyond the language system.