title: Do statistical segmentation abilities predict lexical-phonological and lexical-semantic abilities in children with and without SLI?
abstract: This study tested the predictions of the procedural deficit hypothesis by investigating the relationship between sequential statistical learning and two aspects of lexical ability, lexical-phonological and lexical-semantic, in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Participants included forty children (ages 8;5-12;3), twenty children with SLI and twenty with typical development. Children completed Saffran's statistical word segmentation task, a lexical-phonological access task (gating task), and a word definition task. Poor statistical learners were also poor at managing lexical-phonological competition during the gating task. However, statistical learning was not a significant predictor of semantic richness in word definitions. The ability to track statistical sequential regularities may be important for learning the inherently sequential structure of lexical-phonological, but not as important for learning lexical-semantic knowledge. Consistent with the procedural/declarative memory distinction, the brain networks associated with the two types of lexical learning are likely to have different learning properties.
authors: University of Toronto, ON, Canada.
authors: Elina
authors: E
authors: Mainela-Arnold
authors: Speech Language and Hearing Sciences and Joint Doctoral Program in Language & Communication Disorders, SDSU/UCSD, San Diego, CA, USA.
authors: Julia L
authors: JL
authors: Evans
mesh_terms: D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D010700:Phonetics; D011337:Probability Learning; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary