Visual processing and language-mediated visual attention in children with specific language impairme

Dr. Andrea Helo- Departamento de Fonoaudiología & Departamento de Neurociencia, Universidad de Chile

Linguistic and visual processing are closely related from early stages of development. Verbal stimuli typically occur situated in children’s visual context and both visual and linguistic modalities influence each other during development. However, the nature this relation is intricated. Is there a causal role of

visual processing on language acquisition? Does language influence the developmental trajectory of visual attention? Existing studies using audiovisual tasks (i.e., look-while-listening) have shown that linguistic processing guide visual behavior of typically

developing infants and children. Moreover, children’s visual skills and visual context is known to modulate language acquisition. However, much less is know about the interaction of visual and language processing in children with acquisition difficulties. Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) show significant difficulties in both expression and comprehension of language. These difficulties cannot be explained by motor, auditory, cognitive or neurological problems. Nowadays, it is accepted that the difficulties of children with SLI are not completely "language specific" and that these children have difficulties with different cognitive abilities, including attention. Could some of the difficulties observed in children with SLI be explained by the ill interaction between visual and linguistic processing? In the presented work, we examined the time course of language-mediated visual attention in children with SLI, typical development control group (TD) and adults in a number of linguistic tasks (semantic, phonological grammatical). In addition, we investigated strategies of visual processing, and visual representations (i.e., objects’ shape) in these children. Our results indicate that children with SLI exhibit a similar visual attention pattern relative to TD control group in semantic and phonological tasks. By contrast, SLI children present more difficulties than their pairs in processing grammatical cues. Finally, children with SLI appear to disregard objects’ shape, known to be relevant for vocabulary acquisition, during word recognition. This suggest that children with SLI might not be using visual representation in the same way that typically developing children do, which might have in turn an impact on their language developmental trajectory.