Previous research has demonstrated that children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) also have difficulties with certain types of memory tasks. This project will examine one type of memory of SLI children: immediate memory for item order. The research question that will be explored is whether the memory limitations of SLI children are exclusively for items stored in memory by name rather than items stored in memory by vidual characteristics. It is predicted that SLI children will have difficulty on tasks in which the ordered stimuli can be recoded as words and stored in phonetic form, but not on tasks in which the stimuli do not lend themselves to phonetic recoding. Two experiments are proposed to test these predictions. Study 1 will examine the ability of SLI children to recognize and reconstruct the order of stimuli briefly presented in either visual or auditory modalities. Study 2 will examine memory for the serial order of verbal stimuli that can or cannot be easily recoded into phonological patterns for storage (e.g., a picture of a tree might be stored by remembering the word """"""""tree"""""""" whereas a picture of a complex geometrical form cannot easily be recoded into a phonological pattern for storage). In each study, a group of SLI children will serve as the target group and will be compared to: (a) a group of typically developing children who will be matched with the SLI children on non-verbal mental age and (b) a group of typically developing children matched with the SLI children on the grammatical complexity of their sentences in a language sample. Subjects in each study will participate in a variety of computer tasks assessing visual and/or auditory serial memory. The theoretical importance of the proposed work lies in the long term objective of determining whether the memory difficulties exhibited by SLI children might contribute to their language problems, might arise as a result of the language problems or might be due to some underlying factor that affects both language and memory. In addition, it is clinically important to determine the nature of SLI children's memory problems in order to plan effective intervention strategies.
| Fazio, B B (1998) The effect of presentation rate on serial memory in young children with specific language impairment. J Speech Lang Hear Res 41:1375-83 |
