Information Processing by School-Age Children with Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from a Modality Effect Paradigm

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Journal of Speech-Language-Hearing Research

Volume

41

Issue

4

Publisher

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

Publication Date

1998

First Page

913

Last Page

926

Abstract

School-age children with specific language impairment (SLI)and age-matched controls were tested for immediate recall ofdigits presented visually, auditorily, or audiovisually. Recalltasks compared speaking and pointing response modalities. Eachparticipant was tested at a level that was consistent with heror his auditory short-term memory span. Traditional effectsof primacy, recency, and modality (an auditory recall advantage)were obtained for both groups. The groups performed similarlywhen audiovisual stimuli were paired with a spoken response,but children with SLI had smaller recency effects together withan unusually poor recall when visually presented items werepaired with a pointing response. Such results cannot be explainedon the basis of an auditory or speech deficit per se, and suggestthat children with SLI have difficulty either retaining or usingphonological codes, or both, during tasks that require multiplemental operations. Capacity limitations, involving the rapiddecay of phonological representations and/or performance limitationsrelated to the use of less demanding and less effective codingand retrieval strategies, could have contributed to the workingmemory deficiencies in the children with SLI.

Comments

Published by American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in Journal of Speech-Language-Hearing Research. Publisher PDF is available through link above. Publisher requires a subscription to access article.

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