|
|
It is now well known that lower nonlinguistic task performance often accompanies the observable difficulty in spoken language of children with primary or specific language impairment (LI). In particular, previous work has implicated auditory and visual memory deficits and subtle perceptual-motor difficulties for monolingual children with LI. However, like language tasks, many nonlinguistic tasks are subject to the combined effects of children’s underlying cognitive-linguistic abilities and their task experience as well as task difficulty. Untangling the effects of ability, experience, and task demands has immediate implications for theories of language learning and breakdown and for educational practices with children who are identified with LI. Currently, it is not clear whether and which nonlinguistic deficits are robust and reliable enough to inform the behavioral phenotype of LI as it is realized across diverse learning contexts. This presentation focuses mainly on linguistic diversity, with comparisons between monolingual speakers and sequential bilingual speakers, whose language proficiency is distributed across two languages. Our recent findings are from monolingual English and bilingual Spanish-English speaking children with and without LI, and typically developing Hmong-English speaking children. The school-age children were administered nonlinguistic tasks emphasizing real-time perceptual-motor and memory demands as well as linguistically mediated tasks, including nonword repetition and rapid naming. At both the group and individual levels, the findings speak to the significance of nonlinguistic performance in the LI profile. The findings also highlight language-specific effects even in tasks with a minimal language component. This research is supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (grant HD053222). |
|