Retrieval-Based Word Learning in Developmental Language Disorder

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD; also referred to as specific language impairment) experience a significant deficit in language ability that is longstanding and harmful to the children's academic, social, and eventual economic wellbeing. Word learning is one of the principal weaknesses in these children. This project focuses on the word learning abilities of four- and five-year-old children with DLD. The goal of the project is to build on our previous work to determine whether, as we have found thus far, special benefits accrue when these children must frequently recall newly introduced words during the course of learning. In this first of a series of studies, we seek to increase the children's absolute levels of learning while maintaining the advantage that repeated retrieval holds over comparison methods of learning.