Working Memory and Morphosyntax in Children with Specific (Primary) Language Impairment

Abstract

Background and rationale: Mexican children with Specific (Primary) Language Impairment (SLI) were assessed in order to evaluate how Spanish complex morphology and Spanish complex syntax are related to the performance of Working Memory. Many studies have assessed Working Memory performance in children with SLI, specifically through their performance in non-word repetition tasks. Nonword repetition is a useful task to assess storage capacity. However, another important working memory component (according to Baddeley's model) is the Central Executive. Moreover, children with SLI have difficulties processing syntactic complex sentences (Simon-Cereijido G, Gutiérrez-Clellen VF: App Psycho Linguist 28(2):317-339, 2007). The aim of the study was to analyze (1) how Spanish-speaking children processed linguistic information by responding to content questions related to relative sentences; (2) how children stored phonological information by repeating nonwords included in simple and complex sentences. Research Question. How does syntactic complexity in relative sentences interact with Working Memory abilities in Mexican children with and without SLI? Methods: Performance of Working Memory was assessed in fifteen children with SLI compared to fifteen children with Typical Language Development (TLD). The task was based on the Modified Listening Span task proposed by Marton and Schwartz (J Speech Lang Hear Res 46(5): 1138-1153, 2003), based on Daneman's and Carpenter's (J Verb Learn Verb Behav 19(4):450-466, 1980) Listening Span task. In this task, children listened to sentences with nonwords included at the end. After each sentence, children repeated the last word (storage capacity) and, just after repetition, they answered to a content question (processing function). In order to identify to what extent the relative sentences interacted with Working Memory, ten subordinate sentences and ten simple sentences were created. Results and discussion. Syntactic complexity in relative sentences showed a significant interaction with Working Memory abilities. Children in both groups commited significantly more mistakes in the storage capacity when sentences were syntactically complex. Moreover, Children with TLD repeated nonwords and answered the questions more accurately than SLI children did, despite the sentence complexity. Processing was more affected on both groups than the storage ability, when children were exposed to complex working memory tasks. Significant differences were found in the number of errors generated in relative sentences versus simple sentences. These tasks have the potential to be used for the identification of children with SLI. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)