[Visual short-term memory in children with specific language impairment].

BACKGROUND relationship between Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and visual short-term memory. AIM to compare the performance of children with SLI to a control group of children with normal language development in tasks involving visual short-term memory. METHOD subjects were 20 SLI children (ages 3;0 to 5;11), and 29 children with normal language development (ages 2;0 to 4;11), assessed in tasks of visual short-term memory involving picture recognition and localization recall of objects previously manipulated by the examiner. As the diagnosis of SLI implies in the linguistic age being at least one year below the expected for the chronological age, the control group was also constituted by younger children with normal language development. RESULTS SLI children presented an inferior performance when compared to their pairs of the same age, similar to the younger children or below the younger age group. CONCLUSION SLI children presented deficits in tasks involving visual short-term memory, which must be discussed in order to understand the nature of the disorder and also in terms of speech-language intervention.