Abstract
This study tests the hypothesis that developmental dyslexia is (partly) caused by a deficit in implicit sequential learning, by investigating whether infants at familial risk of dyslexia can track non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial language. An implicit learning deficit would hinder detection of such dependencies, which mark grammatical relations (e.g. between 'is' and '-ing' in 'she is happily singing'). In a head-turn experiment with infants aged 1;6, family risk and typically developing infants were exposed to one of two novel languages containing dependencies of the type a-X-c, b-X-d or a-X-d, b-X-c, with fixed first and third elements and twenty-four different X elements. During test, typically developing children listened longer to ungrammatical strings (i.e. that did not correspond to their training language). However, family-risk children did not discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical strings, indicating deficient implicit learning. The implications of these findings in relation to dyslexia and other language-based disorders are discussed. Copyright © 2012 Cambridge University Press.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 11-28 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Journal of Child Language |
Volume | 40 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2013 |
Keywords
- article
- auditory stimulation
- child development
- dyslexia
- family
- female
- human
- infant
- language
- language development
- learning disorder
- linguistics
- male
- psychological aspect
- risk factor