Yague, E. & Torrens, V.
Facultad de Psicologia, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
Specific Language Impairment is a delay in the onset of language once it has been acquired in the absence of any neurological, cognitive, or psychological difficulties. This disorder covers a wide range of abnormal development involving phonology, lexicon, morphology and syntax. A question that researchers have been trying to answer is whether the different symptoms found in SLI are due to the low capacity of phonological short term memory (Edwards & Lahey 1998, Ellis Weismer et al. 2000, Gathercole & Baddeley 1990). In order to test this capacity we have applied a test of repetition on nonwords with high and low frequency syllables (Aguado et al. 2006), a test of words and nonwords, and the test of memory of digits of WAIS (Kaplan & Sacuzzo 2005). We present a research on eleven Spanish speaking children with Specific Language Impairment, compared with eleven normal developing age-matched children. Children are aged between 4 and 9 years old. We found that normal developing children have higher scores on the tests of words (P < 0.05), nonwords (P < 0.05), and digits (P < 0.05) than children with SLI. We compared the results of the nonword repetition test for SLI and normal developing children, with high a low frequent syllables. The nonword repetition test differentiates normal developing children from SLI children better than the word repetition test; low frequency sillables differentiates both groups better than high frequency syllables. We can conclude that phonological short term memory is a crucial factor that determines specific language impairment in childhood from very early on.