Audrey Gabriel

Exploration of serial structure procedural learning in children with language impairment.

Recent studies on specific language impairment (SLI) have suggested that language deficits are directly associated with poor procedural learning abilities. Findings from our previous work are contrary to this hypothesis; we found that children with SLI were able to learn eight-element-long sequences as fast and as accurately as children with normal language (NL) on a serial reaction time (SRT) task. A probabilistic rather than a deterministic SRT paradigm was used in the current study to explore procedural learning in children with SLI to mimic real conditions of language learning. Fifteen children with or without SLI were compared on an SRT task including a probabilistic eight-element-long sequence. Results show that children with SLI were able to learn this sequence as fast and as accurately as children with NL, and that similar sequence-specific learning was observed in both groups. These results are novel and suggest that children with SLI do not display global procedural system deficits.

Procedural Learning in Specific Language Impairment: Effects of Sequence Complexity

According to the procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH), abnormal development in the procedural memory system could account for the language deficits observed in specific language impairment (SLI). Recent studies have supported this hypothesis by using a serial reaction time (SRT) task, during which a slower learning rate is observed in children with SLI compared to controls. Recently, we obtained contrasting results, demonstrating that children with SLI were able to learn a sequence as quickly and as accurately as controls. These discrepancies could be related to differences in the statistical structure of the SRT sequence between these studies. The aim of this study was to further assess, in a group of 21 children with SLI, the PDH with second-order conditional sequences, which are more difficult to learn than those used in previous studies. Our results show that children with SLI had impaired procedural memory, as evidenced by both longer reaction times and no sign of sequence-specific learning in comparison with typically developing controls. These results are consistent with the PDH proposed by Ullman and Pierpont (2005) and suggest that procedural sequence-learning in SLI children depends on the complexity of the to-be-learned sequence.