Many children with specific language impairment (SLU) perform poorly on tasks requiring them to process linguistic and non-linguistic material. These findings have led to the proposal that these children have limited processing capacities, defined as a limitation in both the amount of material that can be integrated and stored, and the speed with which integration and storage can occur. These two complementary avenues of investigation processing capacity tasks and response time-based processing speed tasks, the performance of eight to tenth grade children with SLI will be compared to that of normally developing peers, and to that of a group of children with limitations on non-linguistic cognitive as well as linguistic ability. The profiles of the children's performance will be examined to determine the degree to which their processing limitations can be viewed as general, covering non-linguistic as well as linguistic ability. The profiles of the children's performance will be examined to determine the degree to which their processing limitations can be viewed as general, covering non-linguistic as well as linguistic areas of functioning. Findings from the same children in second and third grade will also be examined to determine the stability of the children's processing abilities, and the degree to which the children's earlier performance on processing tasks can predict later language abilities. The children will also participate in tasks employing event-related potential (ERP) recordings. Data from these tasks should indicate whether the neural subsystems for linguistic and non-linguistic processing in children with SLI reflect the same organizational and temporal characteristics seen in typically developing children.
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