Procedural memory in oral and visual modalities: an experiment with typical developing children, children with SLI and adults

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Procedural memory in oral and visual modalities: an experiment with typical developing children, children with SLI and adultsProcedural memory was hypothesized as being impaired in children with language difficulties as well as other populations in Ullman and Pierpont (2005). A special argument in this research was that not only would a deficit in procedural memory be observed in children with specific language impairment (SLI), but that this deficit would not be limited to language and would also exist in non-language tasks.The goal of the current work was to develop a way to test the procedural memory performances of subjects in a language task in the oral modality and in a non-language task in the visual modality. The testing procedure was experimented in various populations: typically-developing 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds, 9-year-olds, adult controls and children with SLI. Each group was composed of twelve subjects. The hypothesis was that there would be no differences between the two modalities for all subjects and that children with SLI would present a deficit in the two modalities.Results for the adults demonstrated that they were able to learn to generalize sequences from the training phase. The younger children did not demonstrate the same behaviour. The older children were better than the younger children but not as good as adults. The children with SLI had the same performance as their age-control group (9-year-olds).Stronger results for young children may have been obtained with longer training sessions and with larger number of subjects. However, it did not seem that procedural memory was deficient in children with SLI, at least using this testing material and procedure.Ullman, M. T., & Pierpont, E. I. (2003). Specific language impairment is not specific to language: the procedural deficit hypothesis. Cortex, 41, 399-433.