Substantial research suggests an association between SLI and a range of cognitive and motor impairments (for reviews see Hill, 2001 Leonard, 2000 Ullman & Pierpont, 2005). Specific language impairment (SLI) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired or delayed language skills that occur in the absence of intellectual, sensory or medical problems (American Psychiatric Association, 2000 World Health Organization, 1996). Human Communication and Deafness (HCD), School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Manchester, Ellen Wilkinson Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.Į-mail address: (G. All rights reserved.ĥ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Procedural Deficit Hypothesis (PDH) Procedural memory Specific language impairment (SLI) Meta-analysis Ullman dĪ School of Psychology, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia b School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK c Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia d Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., USA
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Procedural learning deficits in specific language impairment (SLI): A meta-analysis of serial reaction time task performance5 The contributions of age and SRT task characteristics to learning are discussed with respect to impaired and compensatory neural mechanisms in SLI. Differences among individual study effect sizes, examined with meta-regression, indicated that smaller effect sizes were found in studies with older participants, and in studies that had a larger number of trials on the SRT task. This suggests SLI is associated with impairments of procedural learning as measured by the SRT task. In this report, results from eight studies that collectively examined 186 participants with SLI and 203 typically-developing peers were submitted to a meta-analysis. A number of studies have used Serial Reaction Time (SRT) tasks to investigate procedural learning in SLI. It has also been suggested that declarative memory can compensate for at least some of the problems observed in individuals with SLI. The Procedural Deficit Hypothesis (PDH) proposes that SLI is largely explained by abnormal functioning of the frontal-basal ganglia circuits that support procedural memory. Meta-analysis and meta-regression were used to evaluate whether evidence to date demonstrates deficits in procedural memory in individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), and to examine reasons for inconsistencies of findings across studies. Abstract of research paper on Psychology, author of scientific article - Jarrad A.G.