Abstract
Purpose: The vulnerability of statistical learning (SL) in developmental language disorder (DLD) has mainly been demonstrated with metacognitive offline measures which give little insight into the more specific nature and timing of learning. Our aims in this study were to test SL in children with and without DLD with both online and offline measures and to compare the efficiency of SL in the visual and acoustic modalities in DLD.Method: We explored SL in school-age children with and without DLD matched on age and sex (n = 36). SL was investigated with the use of acoustic verbal and visual nonverbal segmentation tasks relying on online (reaction times and accuracy) and offline (two-alternative forced choice, 2AFC and production) measures.Results: In online measures, learning was evident in both groups in both the visual and acoustic modalities, while offline measures showed difficulties in DLD. The visual production task showed a significant learning effect in both groups, while the visual two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) and the two acoustic offline tasks only showed evidence of learning in the control group. The comparison of learning indices revealed an SL impairment in DLD, which is present in both modalities.Conclusions: Our findings suggest that children with DLD are comparable to typically developing (TD) children in their ability to extract acoustic verbal and visual nonverbal patterns that are cued only by transitional probabilities in online tasks, but they show impairments on metacognitive measures of learning. The pattern of online and offline measures implies that online tests can be more sensitive and valid indices of SL than offline tasks, and the combined use of different measures provides a better picture of learning efficiency, especially in groups where metacognitive tasks are challenging.
Highlights
The complex process through which infants become proficient language users relies on a number of cognitive functions
Since the Hungarian diagnostic system relies on the ICD10, in which developmental language disorder (DLD) is not a unique category, we recruited children that had a previous diagnosis of Expressive language disorder (F80.1), Mixed receptive-expressive language disorder (F80.2) or Developmental disorder of speech and language, unspecified (F80.9) by the Expert and Rehabilitation Committee on Cognitive Capacities of the local Pedagogical Professional Services
Acoustic Verbal Segmentation To investigate the progress of learning through blocks, we calculated median RTs and accuracy rates for each block
Summary
The complex process through which infants become proficient language users relies on a number of cognitive functions. The substantial role of SL in language acquisition has been demonstrated by studies showing associations of SL with lexical knowledge (Yu, 2008; Spencer et al, 2015), sentence comprehension (Kidd, 2012; Misyak and Christiansen, 2012; Kidd and Arciuli, 2016) and language related skills such as reading and writing (Nicolson and Fawcett, 2011; Arciuli and Simpson, 2012; Arciuli, 2018) In accordance with these findings, research in atypical populations have shown SL impairments in individuals with language or literacy problems such as developmental dyslexia (e.g., Pavlidou et al, 2010; Gabay et al, 2015; Kahta and Schiff, 2016; Sigurdardottir et al, 2017; for a meta-analysis see: van Witteloostuijn et al, 2017) or developmental language disorder (DLD; e.g., Evans et al, 2009; Hedenius et al, 2011; Hsu et al, 2014; Lukács and Kemény, 2014; Haebig et al, 2017; Lammertink et al, 2020a; for meta-analyses see: Obeid et al, 2016; Lammertink et al, 2017). Linguistic impairment is frequently associated with SL deficits, it is not yet clear whether SL is causal in language problems
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