WORKING MEMORY AND ATTENTION IN CHILDREN WITH SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a developmental disorder which affects a large number of children in the preschool years and may present long-term effects, posing children at risk of developing specific reading and spelling difficulties at school age. At the level of underlying cognitive processes, deficits of phonological working memory (PhWM), which is part of the complex network of the executive functions, have been considered as the genetic 'marker' of SLI: PhWM, in fact, has been found to be faulty in children affected by SLI, even after resolving their language difficulties. More recently however, other potential sources of language difficulties have been put forward within a limited processing account that goes beyond language development itself Evidence has grown suggesting that processing deficits underlying SLI may not be limited to PhWM but they may be more widespread. We present data from our Laboratory on PhWM and attention in SLI children with the aim to test if PhWM is the only source of difficulties or if other components of the WM system are negatively affected in these children. Moreover we tested if general or domain specific processing limitation interpretations underlie different clinical manifestations of SLI. Results add some knowledge relative to the cognitive resources available to children with SLI of different typology which might be beneficial for intervention programs specifically tailored for this clinical population.