| Popis: |
Purpose: The aim of the study was to determine whether memory limitations in children with developing language disorder (DLD) were specific to verbal memory or whether impairment extends into the nonverbal memory domain. We hypothesized that these children would exhibit verbal memory deficits (as established in the literature), while their nonverbal memory abilities would be spared. Method: Sixteen children with DLD and 16 typically developing (TD) children who were matched on age, gender and nonverbal IQ (9-11 years), completed two simple memory and two complex memory span tasks that were structurally and functionally similar in the verbal and nonverbal domains, with the only difference between the domains being the nature of the representations that the children were asked to handle. The nonverbal memory tasks were carefully designed to be as nonverbal as possible, discouraging verbal labels and minimizing verbal mediation. Results: Results revealed that children in the DLD group attained significantly poorer performance on both verbal simple and complex memory tasks, however, performed comparably to the matched TD group on both nonverbal simple and complex memory tasks. Within group performance revealed significantly better performance on simple memory compared to complex memory tasks across presentation domains, and better performance on verbal memory compared to nonverbal memory across memory domains. Conclusions: Results were interpreted to suggest that children with DLD have a specific verbal memory deficit, regardless whether they were asked to only store information (simple memory), or engage in concurrent information storage and processing (complex memory). Unlike verbal memory, both groups found it challenging to coordinate storing and processing nonverbal information when verbal labelling and verbal mediation was minimized, and novelty of the stimuli/items used were preserved throughout the task. |
