Abstract

Previous studies of verbal short-term memory (STM) indicate that STM for serial order may be linked to language development and developmental language disorder (DLD). To clarify whether a domain-general mechanism is impaired in DLD, we studied the relations between age, non-verbal serial STM, and language competence (expressive language, receptive language, and language reasoning). We hypothesized that non-verbal serial STM differences between groups of children with DLD and typically developing (TD) children are linked to their language acquisition differences. Fifty-one children with DLD and sixty-six TD children participated as part of the HelSLI project in this cross-sectional study. The children were 4–6-year-old monolingual native Finnish speakers. They completed several tests of language and cognitive functioning, as well as new game-like tests of visual and auditory non-verbal serial STM. We used regression analyses to examine how serial STM moderates the effect of age on language. A non-verbal composite measure of serial visual and auditory STM moderated cross-sectional development of receptive language in the children with DLD. This moderation was not observed in the TD children. However, we found more rapid cross-sectional development of non-verbal serial STM in the TD children than in the children with DLD. The results suggest that children with DLD may be more likely to have compromised general serial STM processing and that superior non-verbal serial STM may be associated with better language acquisition in children with DLD.

Highlights

  • The current study investigates an order processing mechanism that is assumed to contribute to short-term memory (STM) for both verbal and non-verbal sequences

  • We developed two novel tasks to test serial STM in Developmental language disorder (DLD) without using verbal material

  • Our results indicated that serial STM improves more slowly with age in children with DLD than in TD children

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Summary

Introduction

The current study investigates an order processing mechanism that is assumed to contribute to short-term memory (STM) for both verbal and non-verbal sequences. We explore the possible association of performance in non-verbal serial STM tasks to successful language acquisition. To this end, we introduce auditory and visual versions of a non-linguistic order. There is contemporary agreement acknowledging that children with DLD can have deficits in their non-verbal abilities (Bishop et al, 2017) such as sustained attention (Finneran et al, 2009; Ebert and Kohnert, 2011), processing speed (Leonard et al, 2007), procedural learning (Ullman and Pierpont, 2005; Ullman et al, 2020), and working memory (WM) and STM (Leonard et al, 2007; Montgomery et al, 2010; Vugs et al, 2013; Archibald, 2017; Henry and Botting, 2017). The current study aims to investigate serial order processing as a necessary component in both nonverbal STM tasks and language acquisition, and to determine if it plays a role in DLD

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