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Spoken sentence comprehension in children with dyslexia and language impairment: The roles of syntax and working memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2009

ERIN K. ROBERTSON  and
MARC F. JOANISSE
ERIN K. ROBERTSON
Affiliation:
University of Québec at Montréal
MARC F. JOANISSE*
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Marc Joanisse, Department of Psychology, Social Sciences Centre, Room 7336, University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5C2, Canada. E-mail: marcj@uwo.ca
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Abstract

We examined spoken sentence comprehension in school-age children with developmental dyslexia or language impairment (LI), compared to age-matched and younger controls. Sentence–picture matching tasks were employed under three different working memory (WM) loads, two levels of syntactic difficulty, and two sentence lengths. Phonological short-term memory (STM) skills and their relation to sentence comprehension performance were also examined. When WM load was minimized, the LI group performed more poorly on the sentence comprehension task compared to the age-matched control group and the dyslexic group. Across groups, sentence comprehension performance generally decreased as the WM load increased, but this effect was somewhat more pronounced in the dyslexic group compared to the age-matched group. Moreover, both the LI and dyslexic groups showed poor phonological STM compared to the age-matched control group, and a significant correlation was observed between phonological STM and sentence comprehension performance under demanding WM loads. The results indicate subtle sentence processing difficulties in dyslexia that might be explained as resulting from these children's phonological STM limitations.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 141 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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