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Non-adjacent dependency learning in infants at familial risk of dyslexia*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

ANNEMARIE KERKHOFF ,
ELISE DE BREE ,
MAARTJE DE KLERK  and
FRANK WIJNEN
ANNEMARIE KERKHOFF*
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
ELISE DE BREE
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
MAARTJE DE KLERK
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
FRANK WIJNEN
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
*
Address for correspondence: Annemarie Kerkhoff, Utrecht University, Institute of Linguistics, Trans 10, Utrecht 3512 JK, Netherlands. e-mail: a.o.kerkhoff@uu.nl
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Abstract

This study tests the hypothesis that developmental dyslexia is (partly) caused by a deficit in implicit sequential learning, by investigating whether infants at familial risk of dyslexia can track non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial language. An implicit learning deficit would hinder detection of such dependencies, which mark grammatical relations (e.g. between ‘is’ and ‘-ing’ in ‘she is happily singing’). In a head-turn experiment with infants aged 1;6, family risk and typically developing infants were exposed to one of two novel languages containing dependencies of the type a-X-c, b-X-d or a-X-d, b-X-c, with fixed first and third elements and twenty-four different X elements. During test, typically developing children listened longer to ungrammatical strings (i.e. that did not correspond to their training language). However, family-risk children did not discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical strings, indicating deficient implicit learning. The implications of these findings in relation to dyslexia and other language-based disorders are discussed.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Special Issue 1: Atypical development , January 2013 , pp. 11 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

[*]

We thank Eline van Baal, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan, Desiree Capel, Laura Geurts, Rebecca Gómez, Britt Hakvoort, Sophie de Koning and Theo Veenker for their diverse contributions to this study. This research was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), grant nr. 360-70-270.

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