[lingtalks] Monday: Julia Evans (Linguistics Colloquium)

[Klinton Bicknell]

On Monday 14 April at 2pm, Julia Evans (SDSU; http://slhs.sdsu.edu/facultydetail.php?ID=148 
  ) will give a colloquium in the UCSD Linguistics Department, in AP&M  
4301.

:: Abstract ::

Beyond the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis of SLI:
Implicit learning in children with Specific Language Impairment.

The term Specific Language Impairment (SLI) refers to a group of  
children who have difficulty acquiring and using language in the  
absence of hearing, intellectual, emotional, or neurological  
impairments. Language difficulties seen in these children include  
delayed onset and slower acquisition of lexical and grammatical forms,  
smaller vocabularies, and difficulty acquiring and using inflectional  
morphology and complex syntax. To date, theoretical accounts of SLI  
have been grouped broadly into: (1) Processing accounts that view  
language impairments in SLI as secondary to impaired perceptual and/or  
cognitive processing mechanisms; and (2) Linguistic accounts that view  
SLI as the result of deficits in the grammatical system. It has  
recently been suggested that SLI is instead a procedural learning  
impairment.

This Procedural Deficit Hypothesis (PDH) is an extension of Ullman’s  
Declarative-Procedural (DP) model of language. In the DP model, the  
acquisition and use of the form-meaning associated aspects of language  
(e.g., lexicon) are memorized directly by the declarative memory  
system, whereas the acquisition and use of grammar is supported by one  
type of non-declarative memory referred to as procedural memory. Non- 
declarative (implicit) memory is a heterogeneous collection of  
learning capacities that, in addition to perceptual motor learning  
(e.g., procedural learning), includes probabilistic learning of  
categories, statistical learning, artificial grammar learning, and  
prototype abstraction.
Based upon an extensive review of SLI research, and investigations of  
the speech and language abilities of the KE family – a family with  
inherited speech, language, and motor impairments, Ullman proposes  
that: (1) the pattern of syntactic, morphological, and phonological  
deficits seen in SLI, coupled with poor motor sequencing abilities,  
reduced working memory is consistent with abnormalities in the brain  
structures that support procedural sequential learning and memory and,  
(2) that lexical knowledge is a relative strength in SLI, is subserved  
by the brain systems supporting declarative-memory, and is thus not  
only relatively spared, but is also a possible compensatory learning  
mechanism for these children.

Half of the members of the KE family orofacial apraxia and apraxia of  
speech. In the gold standard for SLI, disorders of the speech sound  
system are seen as a separate diagnostic entity, and the exclusion of  
severe speech production and sound impairments (i.e., apraxia and  
dysarthria) continues to be part of the exclusionary criteria used in  
current large scale epidemiological studies of SLI. Thus, one critical  
question is whether children who meet the gold standard for SLI (e.g.,  
no speech impairments) also evidence procedural learning impairments.  
This talk examines evidence that implicit learning impairments in  
children with SLI extend beyond procedural learning impairments to  
include other aspects of implicit learning and whether this implicit  
learning deficit is domain general or domain specific in nature.

-- 

For further information about the Linguistics department colloquia  
series, including the schedule of future events, please visit http://ling.ucsd.edu/events/colloquia.html 
  .