Examining longitudinal changes in visuospatial working memory in adolescents with Developmental Language Disorder

Adolescents with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) exhibit difficulties in language abilities, affecting their capacity to produce and/or comprehend spoken language. In addition to a main language deficit, DLD is often associated with impairments in executive functioning (EF), including working memory (WM).

A longitudinal study was conducted with 38 participants: 12 adolescents with DLD and 26 typical development (TD) peers. Visuospatial WM was assessed using the Backward Corsi Task (BCT) at three time points.

Adolescents with DLD consistently scored lower than TD on the BCT across all three waves. A significant main effect of wave was also found, indicating that performance improved over time. However, improvements were only significant from Wave 1 to Wave 3, and not between adjacent waves. No significant Group-by-Wave interaction was observed, suggesting similar developmental trajectories across groups.

The findings suggest that while adolescents with DLD show improvements in visuospatial WM over time, their performance seems to remain consistently below that of their TD peers. This may indicate that visuospatial WM difficulties associated with DLD persist into adolescence. These results might be partly explained by the task's engagement of the central executive component, as tasks with high executive demands could account for the observed group differences.