1. Cognitive flexibility in children with specific language impairment (SLI)
Contact Information:
Klara Marton
Barczi College,
Eotvos University, Budapest
Klara Marton1,2, Luca Campanelli1, Naomi Eichorn1
1The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2 Barczi College of Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest
Analysis of responses to distractor items across interference and no-interference conditions
Stimuli
On-line information processing task with subtests targeting task switching, inhibition, and working memory. All subtests were structured similarly.
Repeated target items within each category
No interference condition; high & low frequency distractor words
Interference condition: previous target items become distractors in subsequent categories
INTRODUCTION
Recent findings suggest that children with SLI show difficulty with suppressing irrelevant information; however, results are inconsistent.
Children with SLI show interference/perseveratory errors in various working memory tasks (Marton & Schwartz, 2003; Marton et al., 2007). These data indicate a weakness in controlling interference in distracting contexts as well as in inhibiting a prepotent response.
Children with SLI show difficulty in distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and in filtering out irrelevant items (Spaulding, 2010).
There is a deficit in using contextual information in lexical ambiguity resolution (Norbury, 2005). Children with SLI showed deficient contextual facilitation, in addition to poor suppression of irrelevant information.
Children with SLI show no impairment in inhibition control on a Go-Nogo task (Tropper, 2009).
No interference condition: target items prior to and following distractors
Efficiency
Before distractor
After
distractor
Interference condition: target items prior to and following distractors
Efficiency
eagle
phone
Research Questions
Are SLI children’s frequent perseverative errors related to poor working memory representations, to a deficit in suppressing irrelevant information, and/or to a weakness in flexible switching?
Are children with SLI less efficient than their peers on tasks that involve interference control and thus require cognitive flexibility?
Before distractor
After
distractor
RESULTS
Efficiency on Repeated Items
Efficiency on Items Following Repeated Item
METHODS
Participants
The data show a combination of weaknesses in children with SLI:
These children need more repetitions to strengthen their word representations than the controls;
When relevant information becomes irrelevant, children with SLI have difficulty suppressing that information;
Alternatively, they make their decisions based on item familiarity and not relevance – this may reflect a deficit in binding between mental representations and contextual cues. Weak content-context bindings result in low working memory capacity (Oberauer, 2009).
Interfering stimuli have a larger negative effect on these children’s performance than for the controls.
Children with SLI show diminished switch cost compared to their peers.
CONCLUSIONS
SLI
Age-Matched
TLD (AM)
Language-Matched TLD (LM) N 22
Age (mean)
12.35
12.39
9.53
Language (CELF-4)
80.55 (14.09)
(10.27)
98.8 (11.41)
Nonverbal IQ (TONI)
(14.97)
(18.37)
(9.8)
Accuracy on Repeated Items
Reaction Time on Repeated Items
Acknowledgment: The impact of Inhibition control on working memory in children with SLI, NIH/NIDCD 1R15DC , (Klara Marton, PI); Assessment of cognitive functions in children with intellectual disabilities, P.I. The European Union and the European Social Fund, TÁMOP, (Klara Marton, P.I.)