Productivity, proceduralisation and SLI: Comment on Hsu and Bishop

Hsu and Bishop argue that the underlying deficit in SLI is impaired statistical/procedural learning (in particular, difficulties in learning non-adjacent dependencies). This prevents affected children from developing abstract syntactic representations which in turn leads to diminished productivity. However, grammatical productivity need not be based on abstract syntactic representations. Moreover, abstraction is a matter of degree, and most everyday language use relies on relatively concrete, low-level schemas. I suggest that the grammatical problems in SLI may be due not to failure to develop abstract representations, but to a disruption of later consolidation processes which support the development of fast, automatic and errorfree performance. Productivity, proceduralisation and SLI: Comment on Hsu and