Statistical word learning in Catalan-Spanish and English-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder.
Nadia Ahufinger, Laura Ferinu, Mònica Sanz-Torrent and 2 others
PMID 34613648WHAT IT FOUND
Children with Developmental Language Disorder struggled to implicitly learn patterns in a stream of tones, unlike typically developing peers.
This tone task showed promise as a screening tool, where low scores strongly suggested DLD regardless of the child's native language.
Key findings
01Children with DLD performed significantly worse than typically developing controls on a tone-based statistical word learning task.
02Statistical word learning ability was significantly correlated with both expressive and receptive vocabulary scores.
03Scores of 45% or lower on the tone task were five times more likely in children with DLD than controls in the Catalan-Spanish group, and seven times more likely in the English group.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The two cohorts had different exposure times to the tone stream (21 minutes vs. 42 minutes), which complicates direct comparison of absolute performance between groups. The study is cross-sectional and does not show whether the tone task predicts future language outcomes or responds to intervention. Likelihood ratios indicate the task is better at ruling out DLD than ruling it in with high certainty, meaning false positives are possible. The sample sizes, particularly for the English cohort, were relatively small.
Declared interests
Funded by the National Institutes of Health (Extramural) and non-U.S. government sources. No commercial conflicts of interest were reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use this tone task as a standalone diagnostic tool. While low scores are more common in children with DLD, the likelihood ratios indicate it is not definitive enough to diagnose without additional testing, and high scores are necessary to confidently rule out the disorder.