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Intra-individual variation in sensory processing as a predictor of individual differences in language acquisition
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Poster D88 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Anna Kautto1, Henry Railo1, Elina Mainela-Arnold1; 1University of Turku
Theories regarding the mechanisms underlying individual differences in language abilities have proposed various factors as contributors to language learning difficulties. For example, the generalized slowing hypothesis suggests that domain-general slowness of processing hinders language acquisition (Kail, 1994). Empirical studies have provided some support for these theories, but none of them alone is sufficient in explaining the individual differences. We propose that observations used to support the generalized slowing hypothesis and other theories actually reflect intra-individual variation (IIV) in sensory processing. As a preliminary test of our hypothesis, we examined the relationship between language abilities and IIV in two visuomotor tasks measuring response times (RT) in children aged 7 to 10 (n = 77). We observed that higher language abilities, measured by standardized tests, were associated with lower RT variation, measured by individual RT standard deviations. Additionally, as RT distributions are typically right-skewed, we sought to investigate whether the degree of this skewness as a form of IIV would be associated with language abilities. To this end, we fitted exponentially modified Gaussian distributions to individual participants' RT data, and modelled the parameters reflecting distribution shape as a function of language abilities. We found that lower dispersion and right skew were both associated with stronger language abilities. In our presentation, we relate our proposed hypothesis to other theories explaining the individual differences in language development. We suggest that many findings that support other theories could actually reflect a mechanism of domain-general variation in sensory processing during language acquisition. We posit that increased IIV (inconsistency of sensory processing) hampers updating the neural representations of language, requiring more repetitions for the child to learn patterns in their environment. IIV in RTs has been linked to variation in visual ERP latencies, suggesting that it might be caused by varying sensory processing (Ribeiro et al., 2016). The generalized slowing hypothesis has found support in studies showing longer RTs in children with weaker language abilities. However, as many of these studies solely rely on mean RT estimates, the potential differences between participants in the spread or shape of the distribution might have been overlooked. Our next step is to test our hypothesis using infant data on saccadic RT distributions (in a task measuring attention disengagement from faces to distractors) as a predictor of later language abilities. If our hypothesis holds, we would expect deviations in saccadic RTs at 8 months to predict language abilities at five years. This data is collected and to be analyzed, and preliminary results from this study will be presented. References: Kail, R. (1994). A Method for Studying the Generalized Slowing Hypothesis in Children With Specific Language Impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 37(2), 418–421. https://doi.org/10.1044/jshr.3702.418 Ribeiro, M. J., Paiva, J. S., & Castelo-Branco, M. (2016). Spontaneous Fluctuations in Sensory Processing Predict Within-Subject Reaction Time Variability. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00200
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Disorders: Developmental