Non-adjacent dependency learning in infants at familial risk of dyslexia*. Issue 1 (5th December 2012)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: KERKHOFF, ANNEMARIE; DE BREE, ELISE; DE KLERK, MAARTJE; WIJNEN, FRANK
• Editors: Bavin, Edith L.; Naigles, Letitia R.
• Is Part Of: Journal of child language. Volume 40:Issue 1(2013)
• Page Start: 11
• Page End: 28
• Publication Date: 2012-12-05
• Subjects: Children -- Language -- Periodicals; 401.9305
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305000912000098
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0305-0009

Abstract

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.