Non-adjacent dependency learning in infants at familial risk of dyslexia

Annemarie Kerkhoff, Elise De Bree, Maartje De Klerk, Frank Wijnen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)11-28
Number of pages18
JournalJournal of Child Language
Volume40
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 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

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