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Rationale: Does an adequate training ‘dose’ close the gap between long-term outcomes of learners with and without Developmental Language Disorders (DLD)?
Methods: Twenty college students with DLD and 19 with typical development (TD) attempted to learn 15 word-referent pairs during training that involved self-testing with feedback. Participants cycled through the training until they named 13 of the referents correctly, or until they completed ten cycles. Participants named five referents in the set one day later; five different referents one week later, and the final five referents one month later.
Results: Five participants with DLD and one with TD did not reach mastery. Of those who did, the DLD group required 1.77 times the number of training cycles as the TD group. The groups did not differ in retention of mastered words; they demonstrated similar patterns of forgetting over time.
Conclusions: Adults with DLD require roughly twice the typical amount of experience with new words to encode them successfully. However, consolidation is intact so, once given the necessary number of encoding opportunities, their long-term learning outcomes are good.
NIH:NIDCD5R01DC011742
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