What Learning Impairments Are Observed in Developmental Language and Reading Disorders?
Children with developmental language disorders struggle to learn new words [1] and syntactic constructions [2].Is this a linguistic problem, or do they exhibit difficulties with learning new information more generally Learning is not a unitary phenomenon. Neuropsychological studies have suggested functional and neurological distinctions between different types of learning(Box 2).Ullman and Pierpont [3] were the first to suggest that the procedural learning system, which is involved in implicit learning ,was impaired in individuals with SLI. They proposed that procedural impairments could account for poor learning of grammatical rules, such as the past tense inflection of regular verbs (also see [4]). The postulated impairments in procedural learning were not,however, specific to language;they would have broader effects, with deficits predicted in the acquisition of any skill involving sequences-irrespective of whether the sequences were sensorimotor or abstract. By contrast, declarative learning systems,which support the sort of idiosyncratic mapping required to learn new vocabulary or inflection of irregular verb forms,were argued to be relatively intact.