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Complex sentence comprehension and working memory in children with specific language impairment
James W Montgomery1, Julia L Evans
1Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, USA. montgoj1@ohio.edu
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR
|August 30, 2008
Summary
Children with specific language impairment (SLI) struggle with sentence comprehension due to working memory demands. Both phonological short-term memory and attentional resources are crucial for understanding complex sentences.
Area of Science:
- Child language development
- Cognitive psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Specific language impairment (SLI) affects language acquisition in children.
- Working memory is essential for complex cognitive tasks, including language processing.
- Understanding the relationship between working memory and language comprehension in SLI is critical for intervention.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the association between two working memory mechanisms (phonological short-term memory and attentional resource capacity/allocation) and sentence comprehension in school-age children with SLI.
- To compare these associations in children with SLI to age-matched (CA) and language- and memory-matched (LMM) control groups.
Main Methods:
- Twenty-four children with SLI, 18 CA children, and 16 LMM children participated.
- Participants completed a nonword repetition task (assessing PSTM), the competing language processing task (CLPT; assessing resource capacity/allocation), and a sentence comprehension task (simple and complex sentences).
Main Results:
- The SLI group performed worse on memory tasks compared to the CA group.
- While simple sentence comprehension was comparable across groups, the SLI and LMM groups showed poorer complex sentence comprehension than the CA group.
- For the SLI group, CLPT correlated with complex sentence comprehension, and nonword repetition correlated with simple sentence comprehension.
Conclusions:
- Sentence comprehension, for both simple and complex grammatical structures, is a cognitively demanding task for school-age children with SLI.
- Significant working memory resources are required for successful sentence comprehension in children with SLI.
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