Learning Potential

The observations of this first study, and in particular the ‘insufficiency’ of the WISC-IV to provide more detailed information on the cognitive processes of children with SLI, led us seek alternative, more process-based, assessments of the general cognitive abilities of children with SLI. Dynamic assessment is supposed to measure in vivo the enhanced performance resulting from feedback, cueing, mediating or prompting within the assessment (Botting & Hasson, 2010). In that way, it could provide more detailed information on how children learn (e.g. on their ability to draw benefit from feedback). The eventual enhanced performances, resulting from intervention within the assessment, constitute the child’s learning potential.

There has been some evidence that children with SLI present difficulties in their general learning mechanisms (Gillam & Hoffman, 2004). We therefore conducted a study (chapter 4) to examine these mechanisms in a group of children with Nonspecific Language Impairment (NLI) presenting low verbal and nonverbal abilites (see also 1.4.2). In particular, we wanted to search for differences in learning potential (LP) between children with NLI (N=15), Typically Developing (TD, N=15) children and children with low IQ (low-IQ, N=15). In this study we used an implicit learning task (detection of intruder). Implicit learning includes a collection of learning capacities (e.g. artificial grammar learning, statistical learning, procedural memory). In our case, we use the term implicit to characterize the task because the intervention proposed within the assessment (cf. feedback) was not accompanied with any explicit instruction. We expected to find lower learning potential (LP) in children with NLI than TD children due to their verbal and nonverbal difficulties and lower LP in low-IQ children than in children with NLI due to lower nonverbal abilities. The findings from our study suggest that 1/ NLI children benefit from the presence of the feedback during the three episodes of the learning phase similarly to TD children and low-IQ children (Figure 14) and independently of the stimulus type (geometrical figures, music notes, syllables or nonwords) and 2/ NLI are able to maintain the enhanced performances even after feedback withdrawal and proposal of a new series of stimuli similarly to TD children and low-IQ children. Our results seem to indicate that NLI children present the same learning potential as younger TD children (the TD group was 3 years younger than the NLI and the low-IQ group). In other words, NLI children seem to present a developmental delay in their general learning mechanisms evaluated through an implicit learning task. Further research, however, is needed due to the very high scores obtained in this study (ceiling effect) as well as comparison of NLI and SLI children to search for differences in their general learning mechanisms. Do SLI children present the same developmental delay as children with NLI when compared to TD children? If not, this could be an additional argument to our position of a continuum between children with NLI and children with SLI. In the opposite case, we would have to interpret the low nonverbal abilities of children with NLI as being the result of less inadequate general learning mechanisms, more similar to children with low-IQ.

We currently dispose of few experimental investigations studying the learning potential of children with SLI (for a review Hasson & Botting, 2010). Further research is, thus, needed in order to develop procedures for dynamic assessment of verbal and nonverbal abilities of children with language impairments. In our opinion, these procedures could supplement traditional psychometric assessment insofar as they could offer high-quality information relative, for example, to the strategies children with language impairments set up to resolve a certain task or to their abilities to benefit from intervention. This information would be useful to researchers aiming at investigate the verbal and nonverbal profiles of children with SLI and the factors which differentiate them. Gillam and Hoffman (2004) defend the idea that children with language impairment showing learning potential similar to TD children have better outcomes. Clinicians and educators could use this information to propose more useful intervention strategies especially due to the high risk for subsequent difficulties in literacy development (Hasson & Botting, ib.; Hasson & Joffe, 2007).