Lexical representation in SLI 1 Lexical Representation in Children with SLI: Evidence from a Frequency Manipulated Gating Task

Purpose: We investigated lexical representations of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing chronological age-matched (CA) peers on a frequency manipulated gating task. We tested the hypothesis that children with SLI have holistic phonological representations of words, i.e. that children with SLI would exhibit smaller effects of neighborhood density on gating durations than CA peers, and that children with SLI would be as efficient as CA peers in accessing high frequency words, but that they would differ from their age matched peers in accessing words low frequency words. Method: Thirty-two children (ages 8;5-12;3) participated, 16 children with SLI and 16 typically developing peers matched on age and nonverbal IQ. Children’s word guesses after different gating durations were investigated. Results: Contrary to predictions, we found no group differences in effects of distributional regularity: children in both groups required equally longer acoustic chunks to access words that were low in frequency and came from dense neighborhoods. Instead, children with SLI appeared to vacillate between multiple word candidates at significantly later gates when compared to children in the CA group. Conclusions: Children with SLI did not exhibit evidence for phonologically holistic lexical representations. Instead, they appeared more vulnerable to competing words.