A Study of Controlled Attention in Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

This study compared school-aged children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) on five measures of language, auditory working memory (AWM), and controlled attention (CATT) accuracy, and CATT response time (RT). These measures were gathered from twenty-eight children, between 9 and 14 years of age, and were analyzed using crossed random effect analyses and Pearson correlations. The results suggest that children with DLD are significantly less accurate in their CATT abilities, but not necessarily slower when compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. Also, significant relationships were revealed between CATT accuracy and the language measures used for both children with and without DLD. This supports the idea that children with DLD have general limitations in their attentional control abilities, not necessarily a slower processing speed, and provides evidence in support of theories of language development and language disorder that highlight the role of cognitive abilities