Martinez-Alvarez, A. . 1, 3 , Christou, S. . 1 , Buj Pereda, M. J. . 5 , Sanz-Torrent, M. . 1 , Pons, F. . 1, 4 & de Diego-Balaguer, R. . 1, 2, 3
1 University of Barcelona
2 ICREA
3 Cognition and Brain Plasticity, IDIBELL
4 Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
5 Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) frequently co-occurs with language impairments. In this study we examined whether the acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies is modulated by attention deficits (AD) in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Children with SLI (n=18), and typical developing children (TD, n=18) performed a non-adjacent dependency speech task. Also, attention measures were obtained using the ADHD-IV scale. The main results showed no significant group differences in the language task performance. We then split the sample based on the ADHD-IV scale. We observed that SLI children without AD (n=11) performed equally well to controls. However, SLI children with AD (n=7) showed lower performance than TD children, with their performance not differing from chance. These findings suggest that attention deficits in SLI -but not SLI per se- may underlie problems with long-distance dependencies in language.