2018 Sat Session C 0900

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Session C, Terrace Lounge | 9am

The effects of working memory training on a clinical marker of specific language impairment in French-speaking children
E. Stanford, S. Durrleman, H. Delage

One of the hallmarks of specific language impairment (SLI) is impaired acquisition of expressive language, with persistent difficulty acquiring third person accusative clitic pronouns (3p ACP) considered a clinical marker of the disorder in French-speaking children (Paradis et al., 2003; Tuller et al., 2011). This delay is observed in low production rates of 3p ACPs when compared to 3p nominative or reflexive clitics. Some theories of SLI explain the documented linguistic deficits of this population in terms of an interaction between complex morphosyntactic properties and grammar-independent constraints, such as working memory (WM). Indeed, research has shown a close link between the development of WM and the emergence of complex syntax (Adams & Gathercole, 2000; Jakubowicz, 2011; Montgomery et al., 2008; Engel de Abreu et al., 2011), and it has been argued that incomplete maturation of the SLI WM system limits the development of structures that require the mobilization of greater cognitive resources, as would be the case for 3p ACPs (Jakubowicz & Tuller, 2008; Tuller et al., 2011). Empirical evidence supports this argument, with Durrleman and Delage (2016) reporting a significant positive correlation between WM and the production of 3p ACPs in French-speaking children and adolescents with SLI.

Our work investigates the production of 3p ACPs in 23 French-speaking children with SLI aged 6 to 12 (Table 1) prior to and following an 8-week WM training program (12 effective hours of training) that specifically targets the components of WM that have been shown to be impaired in this population and to be directly related to the mastery of clitics (Durrleman & Delage, 2016). This novel training program, which is in the form of an iPad application, consists of five activities that train both verbal simple span (storage and retrieval of information) and complex span (storage while simultaneously performing an additional mental manipulation). The results of the WM training group are compared to those of 15 age-matched children with SLI who followed a scholastic training. The presence of this control group allowed us to ensure that potential post-training improvements are specifically related to the WM training.

Our results show that following the administered WM training, WM capacity significantly improves (p<.001) (Figure 1)1 and the production rate of 3p ACPs significantly increases (p=.01) (Figure 2), ameliorations which are not observed in the control group. These findings are noteworthy as Melby-Lervåg and Hulme’s 2012 meta-analysis concluded that existing WM training programs show short-lived generalized effects to other comparable measures of WM, but that there was no evidence that such training generalizes to less directly related tasks. That our study led to gains in skills that were not trained (i.e. syntax) suggests that a WM training regime that is firmly grounded in theory and that targets the specific mechanisms shown to underpin the acquisition of syntax may indeed provide effective remediation for children with SLI if incorporated into therapy sessions.