Planning Deficits in Children With Specific Language Impairment Are Reflected in Unnecessarily Awkward Grasps

Specific language impairment (SLI) affects many children, but its symptomatology is still being characterized. An emerging view, which challenges the notion that SLI is specific to language, is that SLI may actually reflect a domain-general deficit in procedural learning. We explored an extension of this hypothesis that a core deficit in SLI involves a domain-general problem in planning.

We used a dowel-transport task to study the extent to which 13 children with SLI and 14 typically developing (TD) controls (ages over both groups between 8;10 [years;months] and 12;11) would adopt initially awkward grasps that ensured comfortable final grasps when reaching out to move a dowel from 1 position to another (the end-state comfort effect). We predicted that children with SLI would be less likely to use end-state comfort grasps than would TD children.

Contrary to our prediction, when awkward grasps were needed to ensure comfortable final grasps, participants with SLI showed the end-state comfort effect as often as the TD children did. Unexpectedly, however, in trials where awkward grasps were not needed for comfortable final grasps, the participants with SLI used more awkward grasps than did the TD participants after trials in which initial awkward grasps were needed.

We suggest that this perseverative behavior is indicative of a domain-general problem in planning in SLI.