Lexical Access in Persian Speaking Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment

Introduction: Word retrieval problems are among the limitations observed in children with specific language impairment during the initial schooling years. These restrictions are predictive of reading problems and poor performance at school. Additionally, studies on lexical access in Persian speaking children are scarce. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate and compare naming accuracy and latency in children with and without specific language impairment. Methods: Twenty 7-9-year-old children with specific language impairment and 20 age-matched peers were recruited as the study participants. They were requested to name the 128 black and white line-drawing pictures from a Persian picture naming set for children, as rapidly as possible. We compared the effects of psycholinguistic variables on naming latency in the explored children with and without specific language impairment. Results: Linear mixed-effects modeling presented an interaction between the research groups and the psycholinguistic variables. Significant main effects were found for name agreement (P=0.00) and the age of acquisition (P=0.05) in children with typical language development; significant effects for name agreement (P=0.00) and log frequency (P=0.00) were revealed in children with specific language impairment. Conclusion: The obtained models indicated that psycholinguistic factors could differently affect the naming latency in children with and without specific language impairment. Factors that may have accounted for the findings are discussed in this paper.