Verbal, visual and musical memory in children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

While there is a large body of evidence linking Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) with impairments in verbal short-term memory (STM), very little research has investigated the impact on auditory processing outside the language domain. Shared cognitive mechanisms may be involved in the maintenance of verbal and musical information in STM, and we hypothesized that impairments in verbal STM would impact musical STM in children with DLD. Children with DLD and two groups of typically developing (TD) children matched for chronological (CA) and verbal mental age (VMA) completed two tasks: one measuring pitch direction discrimination in two-tone sequences, and another measuring memory for pairs of melodies that differed in global contour shape and local intervals within the melodies. All participants were able to discriminate the direction of pitch intervals in two-tone sequences with above-chance accuracy with the CA group showing better discrimination accuracy than the VMA or DLD groups. Melody discrimination was significantly better for melodies that differed at global than local levels in all three groups and the CA group showed better discrimination than the DLD or VMA groups. Correlational analyses revealed that performance on the melody discrimination task was associated with auditory STM in TD children but not children with DLD. Conversely, visual STM was associated with melody discrimination in children with DLD but not TD children. These findings may indicate that visual properties of the musical input could be used to support musical STM in children with DLD.