Implicit Spoken Words and Motor Sequences Learning Are Impaired in Children with Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

Objectives: This study aims to compare verbal and motor implicit sequence learning abilities in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI).

Methods: Forty-eight children (24 control and 24 SLI) were administered the Serial Search Task (SST), which enables the simultaneous assessment of implicit spoken words and visuomotor sequences learning.

Results: Results showed that control children implicitly learned both the spoken words as well as the motor sequences. In contrast, children with SLI showed deficits in both types of learning. Moreover, correlational analyses revealed that SST performance was linked with grammatical abilities in control children but with lexical abilities in children with SLI.

Conclusions: Overall, this pattern of results supports the procedural deficit hypothesis and suggests that domain general implicit sequence learning is impaired in SLI.

Keywords: Child language; Implicit sequence learning; Language development disorders; Procedural learning; Serial learning; Specific language impairment.