Unimpaired Implicit Learning abilities in Children with Specific Language Impairment.

Previous studies (Lum et al., 2009; Tomblin et al., 2007; Ullman & Pierpont, 2005) have suggested that difficulties in the procedural learning system could contribute, in part, to the language difficulties observed in children with SLI. However, we have recently shown, with a classical serial reaction time (SRT) task, that children with SLI are able to learn implicitly non-linguistic statistical regularities (Gabriel et al., 2010). The aim of the present study was to explore whether children with SLI could learn similar statistical regularities with non-linguistic auditory stimuli. For this purpose, we compared performance of children with SLI and controls in two adapted SRT tasks: a visual SRT task and a non-verbal auditory SRT task.