Abstract
Children with specific language impairment (SLI) experience difficulties in learning their native language. Severe and persistent morphosyntactic problems are a hallmark of SLI (e.g. omitting the "s" in "he knows"). Morphosyntactic rules are learned, to some extent, through implicit statistical learning mechanisms. These allow the discovery of patterns by extracting statistical regularities from the (language) input, without explicit instruction. Recent theories of SLI explain morphosyntactic difficulties by an impairment in implicit statistical learning. Besides morphosyntactic problems, lexical-semantic difficulties occur frequently in SLI as well. However, the nature of these lexical-semantic difficulties is relatively understudied. It is not known whether lexical-semantic acquisition develops through the same implicit statistical learning mechanisms as morphosyntactic pattern learning. The proposed research thus aims to investigate whether implicit statistical learning contributes to lexical-semantic knowledge. Previous research has shown that typically developing (TD) children use statistical information to segment words from a stream of speech sounds, and that children with SLI are less capable of doing so. Recently it has been demonstrated that young TD children are also capable of learning word–referent mappings implicitly by tracking statistical information; I will therefore test whether children with SLI share this skill. Moreover, I will develop a new task that measures implicit statistical learning of semantic features. A correlational analysis will be done to investigate whether implicit statistical learning is related to lexical-semantic knowledge in TD and SLI children. In all, this study investigates whether lexical-semantic problems in SLI could be related to an implicit statistical learning deficit.