Little evidence for impaired event-structure coding in language-impaired children

Evidence from research suggests that language-impaired children, who present with reading difficulties, have problems processing a series of multiple events presented in close temporal proximity. This study measured the simultaneity thresholds of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), compared with a sample of children with Specific Reading Disability (SRD) and age-matched typically-developing children. In the individual experimental tasks, participants were asked to make judgments of simultaneity presented in both the visual and auditory modalities. Results suggest that children with SLI and SRD have higher visual but not auditory thresholds of simultaneity. These findings do not support the hypothesis of an auditory temporal processing deficit as a possible cause of SLI and SRD, nor do they provide evidence of a universal timing deficit. However, impairments on the visual task have implications for the non-language specific nature of SLI and SRD and the role of visual processing in reading development. Around 10 % of children struggle to learn to read (specific reading disability: SRD) or to speak their native language (specific language impairment: SLI) despite having average intelligence, no known physiological problems, and having grown up in a typical language learning environment (McArthur, Ellis, Atkinson, & Coltheart, 2008). The exact causes of SRD and SLI remain to this day relatively unknown and the fact that both represent heterogeneous groups; children who present with diverse language profiles and deficits, further complicates the matter. There is a great deal of overlap evident in both the spoken and reading abilities of children with SRD and SLI, which leads some researchers to question whether they represent the same or different conditions (Catts, Adlof, Hogan & Weismer