engleski

Are non-linguistic factors causally related to SLI? Evidence from a crosslinguistic study

Non-linguistic performances of specific language impaired (SLI) and normal language developing (non-SLI) first to fourth graders are compared in the two languages, Croatian and German. Besides of a lot of other linguistic and nonlinguistic task were administered to the 44 SLI and 53 non-SLI Croatian and to the 68 SLI and 53 non-SLI German children: Digit Span Forwards, Digit Span Backwards, Symbol Span and Imitation of Rhythm. The results show that SLI children in both languages differ significantly in their performances in auditory short-term memory whereas no differences between the groups are observed in visual short-term memory. Because auditory short memory is language unspecific, it is argued that deficits in the auditory short-term memory system are in all probability candidates for causal factors of SLI.

crosslinguistic study; non-linguistic domain; SLI; Croatian; German

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