Lammertink, I. 1 , Boersma, P. 1 , Wijnen, F. 2 & Rispens, J. 1
1 University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication
2 Utrecht University, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS
A domain-general statistical learning deficit has been proposed to underlie the linguistic difficulties observed in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The evidence supporting this claim - using within-subject designs - is scarce, however. Therefore, we compared performance on three statistical learning tasks differing in modality and type of statistical dependency: a visual statistical learning task (adjacent dependencies), a visuomotor serial reaction time task (adjacent dependencies) and an auditory statistical learning task (nonadjacent dependencies). 36 children with DLD (mean age = 9.1 years) and 36 typically developing (TD) children, matched on nonverbal intelligence, socioeconomic status and age, participated. The results show that both groups of children are sensitive to adjacent dependencies in the visual and visuomotor domain and thus we find no evidence for (or against) a statistical learning deficit in DLD in these domains nor with their learning of adjacent dependencies. In the auditory domain, children with DLD are less sensitive, if sensitive at all, to the nonadjacent dependencies than their TD peers. Our results will be discussed in the light of recent theoretical accounts proposing that prior (linguistic) knowledge, modality and type of dependency may affect statistical learning in children with and without DLD.