Seminars in Hearing Research at Purdue (SHRP)

Date: Thursday, February 15, 2024
Time: 12pm - 1:00pm
Location:  Lyle 1160

Title: A developmentally grounded account of sequential pattern learning deficits in developmental language disorder.

Speaker: Lisa Goffman, PhD, CCC-SLP, *SLHS Distinguished Alumni* Senior Scientist and Endowed Chair, Boys Town National Research Hospital

Abstract:Infants are able to learn sound patterns that obligate local sequential dependencies that are no longer readily accessible to adults (Gerken et al., 2019). However, adults can learn similar patterns that do not require attention to sequential dependencies. Interestingly, the sound pattern learned so readily by infants is the second most frequent morphophonological pattern across human languages: thus, infants’ ability to learn this pattern may underlie the observation that acquiring a language early in life is important for the development of mature performance. This surprising developmental trajectory, in which infants and young children show learning skills that adults do not, also raises intriguing questions about learning in a group of children characterized by their language difficulties—those with developmental language disorder (DLD). Children with DLD show deficits in the organization of sequential patterns in both language production and non-linguistic motor skill. Thus, DLD does not appear to be a disorder of speech, language, or motor skill, but rather an impaired ability to detect and deploy sequential dependencies over multiple domains. We propose that sequential dependency learning is required for frequently encountered phonological and morphosyntactic patterns in natural language as well as other domain general abilities, and deficits in children with DLD interfere with learning of these sequential dependencies. However, patterns that do not rely on sequential dependencies are learnable by children and adults with DLD.

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