Word stress processing in specific language impairment: Auditory or representational deficits?

Abstract

Word stress processing has repeatedly been reported to be affected in specific language impairment (SLI) with potential consequences for various aspects of language development. However, it still remains unresolved whether word stress impairments in SLI are due to deficits in basic auditory processing or to a degraded phonological representation or both. We addressed this question examining an unselected sample of 10 children with SLI and 11 typically developing (TD) children, aged about 8 years, with respect to their basic auditory processing (duration and skewness discrimination) and phonological representation of prosodic (word stress) and segmental (consonant) contrasts. Our results show lower performance of the SLI group compared to the TD group in all tasks. Crucially, two subgroups of children with SLI emerged from our analyses: While one group was impaired in basic auditory perception, particularly affecting duration discrimination, the other showed no significant auditory processing deficits but a representational impairment.

• Auditory processing
• duration
• dysprosody
• German
• phonological representation
• SLI
• skewness

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Christina Kauschke and two anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments and discussion of earlier versions of the manuscript.

Declaration of interest statement

This research was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG grant DO 1433/1-1) and by a grant from the LOEWE initiative of excellence of the Hessian Ministry of Research and the Arts (project LingBas). The authors report no conflict of interest.

Notes

¹Note that while statistical analyses were performed on arcsine transformed data, figures show non-transformed data for the ease of interpretability.