Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are deficient in processing information. The goal of this study is to enhance our understanding of processing deficits in SLI. This study will explore whether children with SLI are impaired in controlling conflict that arises when they process information. At a cognitive level, conflict occurs when different sources of information compete for an individual's attention. For example, multiple meanings of a word compete during language comprehension and background noise contends with the speech of a classroom teacher. In such circumstances, 'cognitive control1 must be exerted to detect and resolve the conflict so as to enable optimal performance. This study seeks to determine if SLI children are impaired in cognitive control during language and non-language processing of information presented in the auditory and visual modalities. The cognitive control skills of children with SLI between 10-12 years of age, their same-age peers, and of younger chilldren will be examined in GO/No-GO tasks. The participants will be required to press a button (GO) or withold a motor response (No-GO) when presented with stimuli, according to pretest instructions. The stimuli will be words and pictures (language tasks), as well as tones and geometric shapes (non-language tasks). Response time and accuracy will be analyzed as measures of the ability to detect and implement control over conflicting response options. Brain even-related potentials (ERPs) will be collected to allow fine-grained analysis of the neural processes underlying cognitive control over conflict. The need to manage conflicting information during processing is ubiquitous and may therefore play a role in the processing deficits of children with SLI. Clarifying the nature of processing deficits in SLI should aid in establishing specific clinical strategies for intervention in this population. This may include generating research-based guidelines for manipulating information to be processed and for teaching compensatory strategies to resolve conflict that arises when SLI children process information. Results of the proposed study may also enable the identification of markers for the diagnosis of SLI. ? ? ?
| Epstein, Baila; Shafer, Valerie L; Melara, Robert D et al. (2014) Can children with SLI detect cognitive conflict? Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence. J Speech Lang Hear Res 57:1453-67 |
