Working Memory and Interference Control in Children with Specific Language Impairment

Language and communication disorders are often associated with deficits in working memory (WM) and interference control. WM studies involving children with specific language impairment (SLI) have traditionally been framed using either resource theories or decay accounts, particularly Baddeley's model. Although significant interference problems in children with SLI are apparent in error analysis data from WM and language tasks, interference theories and paradigms have not been widely used in the SLI literature. A primary goal of the present paper is to provide an overview of interference deficits in children with SLI. Review of the extant literature on interference control shows deficits in this population; however, the source and the nature of the deficit remain unclear. Thus, a second key aim in our review is to demonstrate the need for theoretically driven experimental paradigms in order to better understand individual variations associated with interference weaknesses in children with SLI.

[1]  K. Marton.  Do nonword repetition errors in children with specific language impairment reflect a weakness in an unidentified skill specific to nonword repetition or a deficit in simultaneous processing? , 2006, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[2]  M. Just,et al.  Working memory constraints on the processing of syntactic ambiguity , 1992, Cognitive Psychology.

[3]  B. Wulfeck,et al.  Verbal Fluency Deficits in Children With Specific Language Impairment: Slow Rapid Naming or Slow to Name? , 2001, Child neuropsychology : a journal on normal and abnormal development in childhood and adolescence.

[4]  S. Monsell.  Recency, immediate recognition memory, and reaction time , 1978, Cognitive Psychology.

[5]  B. Underwood.  Interference and forgetting. , 1957, Psychological review.

[6]  R. Schwartz.  Specific Language Impairment , 2008 .

[7]  Valérie Camos,et al.  Developmental Increase in Working Memory Span: Resource Sharing or Temporal Decay? ☆ , 2001 .

[8]  S. Gathercole,et al.  Language-specific Knowledge and Short-term Memory in Bilingual and Non-bilingual Children , 1999, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[9]  Katharine Graf Estes,et al.  Differences in the nonword repetition performance of children with and without specific language impairment: a meta-analysis. , 2007, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[10]  C Donlan,et al.  Nonword repetition as a behavioural marker for inherited language impairment: evidence from a twin study. , 1996, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[11]  Valerie J. Shute,et al.  Who is Likely to Acquire Programming Skills? , 1991 .

[12]  L Hasher,et al.  Working memory span and the role of proactive interference. , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[13]  P. Carpenter,et al.  Individual differences in working memory and reading , 1980 .

[14]  P. Carpenter,et al.  Individual Differences in Integrating Information between and within Sentences. , 1983 .

[15]  R. Engle,et al.  Voice change in the stimulus suffix effect: Are the effects structural or strategic? , 1983, Memory & cognition.

[16]  R. Schwartz,et al.  Effect of sentence length and complexity on working memory performance in Hungarian children with specific language impairment (SLI): A cross-linguistic comparison. , 2006, International journal of language & communication disorders.

[17]  Nash Unsworth,et al.  Working memory capacity and retrieval from long-term memory: the role of controlled search , 2013, Memory & cognition.

[18]  G. Hitch,et al.  A Reevaluation of Working Memory Capacity in Children , 1998 .

[19]  E. Bialystok,et al.  The development of two types of inhibitory control in monolingual and bilingual children* , 2008, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

[20]  Nathan S. Rose,et al.  Individuals with low working memory spans show greater interference from irrelevant information because of poor source monitoring, not greater activation , 2015, Memory & cognition.

[21]  K. Marton,et al.  Inhibition control and working memory capacity in children with SLI. , 2007, Psikhologyah : ketav 'et mada'i Yisre'eli le-'iyun ule-mehkar.

[22]  P. J. Brooks,et al.  Effects of onset- and rhyme-related distractors on phonological processing in children with specific language impairment. , 2008, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[23]  Alan D. Baddeley,et al.  Phonological working memory: A critical building block for reading development and vocabulary acquisition? , 1993 .

[24]  M. Just,et al.  From the SelectedWorks of Marcel Adam Just 1992 A capacity theory of comprehension : Individual differences in working memory , 2017 .

[25]  D. Navon.  Resources—a theoretical soup stone? , 1984 .

[26]  M. Daneman.  Working memory as a predictor of verbal fluency , 1991 .

[27]  C. Lustig,et al.  Inhibitory Mechanisms and the Control of Attention , 2007 .

[28]  J. Montgomery.  Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment. , 2000, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[29]  Catherine H Balthazar.  The word length effect in children with language impairment. , 2003, Journal of communication disorders.

[30]  Julie A. Van Dyke,et al.  Memory Interference as a Determinant of Language Comprehension , 2012, Lang. Linguistics Compass.

[31]  Klara Marton,et al.  Interaction between working memory and long-term memory: A study in children with and without language impairment. , 2014 .

[32]  E. Thorndike.  Educational psychology, Vol 2: The psychology of learning. , 1913 .

[33]  Julia L. Evans,et al.  An examination of verbal working memory capacity in children with specific language impairment. , 1999, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[34]  D. Bub,et al.  Semantic memory loss in dementia of Alzheimer's type. What do various measures measure? , 1990, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[35]  M. Just,et al.  A capacity approach to syntactic comprehension disorders: making normal adults perform like aphasic patients , 1994 .

[36]  Klara Marton,et al.  EXECUTIVE FUNCTION PROFILES IN CHILDREN WITH AND WITHOUT SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT. , 2012, Rivista di psicolinguistica applicata.

[37]  T. Campbell,et al.  Procedure for Assessing Verbal Working Memory in Normal School-Age Children: Some Preliminary Data , 1994, Perceptual and motor skills.

[38]  Randi C. Martin,et al.  Semantic and phonological influences on picture naming by children and teenagers , 2002 .

[39]  Stephan Lewandowsky,et al.  No temporal decay in verbal short-term memory , 2009, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[40]  M. Just,et al.  Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory , 1991 .

[41]  A. Miyake,et al.  The relations among inhibition and interference control functions: a latent-variable analysis. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[42]  David F. Bjorklund,et al.  The resources construct in cognitive development: Diverse sources of evidence and a theory of inefficient inhibition. , 1990 .

[43]  Clinton L. Johns,et al.  Low working memory capacity is only spuriously related to poor reading comprehension , 2014, Cognition.

[44]  J. Trueswell,et al.  Cognitive control and parsing: Reexamining the role of Broca’s area in sentence comprehension , 2005, Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience.

[45]  A. Bouma,et al.  What is measured by verbal fluency tests in schizophrenia? , 2004, Schizophrenia Research.

[46]  D Howard,et al.  Children with specific language impairment: linguistic impairment or short-term memory deficit? , 1993, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[47]  T. Campbell,et al.  Nonword repetition and child language impairment. , 1998, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[48]  Alice J. Corkill,et al.  Interference and Inhibition in Cognition and Behavior: Unifying Themes for Educational Psychology , 1999 .

[49]  B MacWhinney,et al.  Phonological priming in children's picture naming , 2000, Journal of Child Language.

[50]  Julia L. Evans,et al.  Complex sentence comprehension and working memory in children with specific language impairment. , 2009, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[51]  A. Baddeley,et al.  Phonological memory deficits in language disordered children: Is there a causal connection? ☆ , 1990 .

[52]  Klaus Oberauer,et al.  Design for a working memory. , 2009 .

[53]  Sharon L. Thompson-Schill,et al.  Role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in covert word retrieval: Neural correlates of switching during verbal fluency , 2006, Neuropsychologia.

[54]  G. Conti-Ramsden.  Processing and linguistic markers in young children with specific language impairment (SLI). , 2003, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[55]  N. Cowan,et al.  Sequential memory in children with and without language impairment. , 1995, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[56]  S. Gathercole.  Nonword repetition and word learning: The nature of the relationship , 2006, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[57]  L. Verhoeven,et al.  Lexical access in children with hearing loss or specific language impairment, using the cross-modal picture-word interference paradigm. , 2015, Research in developmental disabilities.

[58]  J. Montgomery.  Working memory and comprehension in children with specific language impairment: what we know so far. , 2003, Journal of communication disorders.

[59]  Richard L. Lewis,et al.  In search of decay in verbal short-term memory. , 2009, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[60]  Jungmee Yoon,et al.  Information processing and proactive interference in children with and without specific language impairment. , 2014, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[61]  B. McElree,et al.  Retrieval interference in sentence comprehension. , 2006, Journal of memory and language.

[62]  Natalie Munro.  Handbook of Child Language Disorders , 2010 .

[63]  Patrick C. Kyllonen,et al.  Cognitive abilities as determinants of success in acquiring logic skill , 1990 .

[64]  Reiko Mazuka,et al.  Development of Executive Control and Language Processing , 2009, Lang. Linguistics Compass.

[65]  Stephan Lewandowsky,et al.  Author ' s personal copy Interference-based forgetting in verbal short-term memory , 2008 .

[66]  Irene P. Kan,et al.  A case for conflict across multiple domains: Memory and language impairments following damage to ventrolateral prefrontal cortex , 2009, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[67]  R. Engle.  Working Memory Capacity as Executive Attention , 2002 .

[68]  M. Dennis,et al.  Developmental relations between working memory and inhibitory control , 2006, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.

[69]  A. Baddeley.  Working memory: looking back and looking forward , 2003, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[70]  Alice J. Corkill,et al.  Interference and Inhibition in Cognition and Behavior: Comments on the Commentaries , 1999 .

[71]  Katherine Kipp,et al.  The Development of Efficient Inhibition: Evidence from Directed-Forgetting Tasks. , 1998 .

[72]  J. Montgomery.  Sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment: the role of phonological working memory. , 1995, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[73]  R. Schwartz,et al.  Lexical access in children with and without specific language impairment: a cross-modal picture-word interference study. , 2008, International journal of language & communication disorders.

[74]  J. Edwards,et al.  Nonword repetitions of children with specific language impairment: Exploration of some explanations for their inaccuracies , 1998, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[75]  D. Messer,et al.  Executive functioning in children with specific language impairment. , 2012, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[76]  Klara Marton,et al.  Working memory capacity and language processes in children with specific language impairment. , 2003, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.