Understanding the language difficulties of children with specific language impairments: does verbal working memory matter?
Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate deficits in both verbal working memory (VWM) and language. Among child language researchers, the debate continues whether these two deficits are related. In this article, I take the position that there is indeed a connection between S...
| Published in: | American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 77 - 92 |
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| Format: | review Journal Article |
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American Speech-Language-Hearing Association
Feb2002
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| Summary: | Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate deficits in both verbal working memory (VWM) and language. Among child language researchers, the debate continues whether these two deficits are related. In this article, I take the position that there is indeed a connection between SLI and VWM. I review evidence suggesting that the lexical/morphological learning and sentence comprehension problems of many of these children are associated with deficient VWM abilities. Evidence is also reviewed for the possibility that deficient VWM provides a clinical marker of SLI. I end by offering various assessment and intervention techniques that may prove useful in SLI. |
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