How language and inhibition influence analogical reasoning in children with or without developmental language disorder?

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Analogical reasoning is a human ability of crucial importance in several domains of cognition, such as numerical abilities, social cognition, and language, and which is impaired in children with developmental language disorder (DLD). This impairment might be caused by their weaknesses in inhibition or by the inefficient use of phonological recoding.

Method: We compared children with DLD and age-matched children without language disorders in an A:B::C:D analogical task. We manipulated two variables: interference (versus no interference) was used to evaluate the impact of articulatory suppression on analogical performance, and distraction (versus no distractor) was used to test whether perceptual distractors (which compete with relational responses) diminish children’s performance.

Results: Contrary to expectations, articulatory suppression does not have a negative effect on analogical reasoning. In contrast, perceptual distractors have a detrimental impact on performance, and children with DLD are more impacted by perceptual distraction than their peers. Moreover, inhibition, as measured by a classical inhibition task, influences performance, but only for children with DLD.

Conclusion: The analogical reasoning impairment observed in DLD, therefore, seems to be related to perceptual distraction and inhibition rather than to phonological recoding. To conclude, this study investigates the analogical reasoning impairment observed in DLD and contributes to our understanding of the relationships between language, analogical reasoning, and executive functions.

KEYWORDS:

• Developmental language disorder
• analogical reasoning
• phonological recoding
• articulatory suppression
• inhibition

Acknowledgments

We thank the children in the study, as well as the parents, teachers, and speech-language therapists. We are grateful to Milena Vezneva for the analogical task, and to Jade Philis and Mathilde Neefs for their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FRESH fund of the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique.