title: Non-adjacent dependency learning in infants at familial risk of dyslexia.
abstract: This study tests the hypothesis that developmental dyslexia is (partly) caused by a deficit in implicit sequential learning, by investigating whether infants at familial risk of dyslexia can track non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial language. An implicit learning deficit would hinder detection of such dependencies, which mark grammatical relations (e.g. between 'is' and '-ing' in 'she is happily singing'). In a head-turn experiment with infants aged 1;6, family risk and typically developing infants were exposed to one of two novel languages containing dependencies of the type a-X-c, b-X-d or a-X-d, b-X-c, with fixed first and third elements and twenty-four different X elements. During test, typically developing children listened longer to ungrammatical strings (i.e. that did not correspond to their training language). However, family-risk children did not discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical strings, indicating deficient implicit learning. The implications of these findings in relation to dyslexia and other language-based disorders are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Utrecht University, Netherlands. a.o.kerkhoff@uu.nl
authors.forename: Annemarie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kerkhoff
authors.forename: Elise
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: De Bree
authors.forename: Maartje
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: De Klerk
authors.forename: Frank
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Wijnen
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D002657:Child Development; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000209:etiology* / Q000523:psychology; D005190:Family; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007859:Learning Disabilities / Q000150:complications / Q000523:psychology; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D012307:Risk Factors