Episodic memory retrieval in adolescents with and without developmental language disorder (DLD).
Joanna C Lee
PMID 29119716WHAT IT FOUND
Twenty-three adolescents with developmental language disorder recognised individual pictures less well than 23 peers, especially after focusing on the picture alone.
Pairing items together seemed to help, but that difference was not clear.
Key findings
01Adolescents with DLD performed worse than peers on item recognition, and this difference did not depend on whether the picture was first encoded alone or with another picture.
02Associative recognition did not differ significantly between the DLD and comparison groups, although the DLD group showed a non-significant trend toward poorer performance.
03The two groups were similarly engaged during encoding, with response rates of 97.67% for the DLD group and 99.03% for the comparison group, and no participant failed the pre-retrieval check.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 23 adolescents with DLD and 23 comparison participants, so it is small. There were more female than male volunteers in the DLD group, which may limit generalisation. The DLD and comparison groups differed in nonverbal IQ, and the authors did not match IQ because of DLD research conventions. This makes it hard to separate memory differences from general cognitive ability. Although the pictures were nonverbal, the encoding and retrieval questions still required language and thinking, which may have affected performance. The study tested recognition memory immediately after encoding, not with delays, everyday memory, or treatment outcomes. There is no gold-standard test for diagnosing DLD in adolescence, so group assignment was research-based.
Declared interests
The author declared no competing interests. The publication types list NIH extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that adolescents with DLD have a general episodic memory impairment independent of IQ, or that memory training would help. The significant difference was for item recognition, associative recognition was not significantly different, and the study tested no intervention.