Better Understanding Slow Language Impairment

This study was designed to examine the development of children aged 6 to 10 with slow language impairment (SLI). The aim was threefold: (1) to investigate language skills of children with SLI at different levels - formal, semantic, pragmatic- in comparison with those of control children; (2) to test a procedural deficit hypothesis: abnormal development in the procedural memory system could account for some language deficits; (3) to make genotype-phenotype comparisons, focusing on the different levels of language development and on procedural skills. The main hypothesis is that genetic mutations, contingently epistatique, will lead to procedural learning deficit, which will have a negative impact on language skills at the formal level and consequently on semantic and pragmatic levels.