Kerry Ebert, Assistant Professor in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, University of Minnesota

Decades of research have firmly established that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate relative weaknesses in a range of cognitive skills, including nonverbal information processing skills. No single cognitive weakness predicts DLD, however; rather, it is likely that multiple underlying deficits contribute to DLD in a probabilistic manner. This presentation will critically review evidence of nonverbal information processing deficits in children with DLD and summarize results of a recent large-scale investigation seeking to advance this literature. This investigation has collected data from over 300 children, aged 5- to 7- years. The sample represents the full spectrum of language ability (including children with and without DLD) and also represents diverse language backgrounds (including English-only monolinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals, and Vietnamese-English bilinguals) to robustly investigate cognitive-linguistic relationships. We examine multiple cognitive skills and utilize latent profile analysis to construct individual cognitive profiles. We then consider the consistency of these profiles across language backgrounds as well as their relationship with language ability.

This is part two in a two-talk series on "Cognitive control and individual differences in language learning and processing", organised by the TEAM programme.