Author: rf37149n

Results added to the growing literature demonstrating working memory deficits in children with SLI. Though these children have demonstrated slower learning rates (Marton et al., under review), this did not seem to impact their performance in this test. Additionally, results indicated children with SLI make more perseveration errors than age- or language matched peers. Number of perseverations did not increase as the task progressed and children had a greater number of previously relevant words to suppress. Further research is needed to examine the underlying reasons why children with SLI demonstrate deficient working memory abilities.

The impact is immense, and I have learned a great deal of information. Though the results are still under review, we see that there is a great need for more research. And working on tasks that assist with working memory, we can find out what the cause is for deficient working memory in children with SLI.

I have been sitting in on the labs at the Graduate CUNY school with my research mentor that I have been working with. I’ve been listening, and getting more information on the topic we are researching on.

Things have been well, sometimes recruiting children to test may be more of a challenge.

So far I have been reading articles on executive function, working memory, and perseveration. I started on implicit learning- able to learn while doing a task. Also, some studies show that SLI (Specific Language Impairment) children learn slower .

There will be project testing for monolingual vs. bilingualism and (SLI)Specific Language Impairment vs. Typical Developing (TD), also we are recruiting TD and SLI children.

As I gather more information with the research project, I am learning more about performance monitoring in children. I have been learning about working memory and storage of knowledge; also short term and long term memory. Working memory is smaller in children with speech language impairments (SLI).

We are going to be giving tests to both children with SLI and typically developed (TD) children. These tests are going to tests the memory of the children and viewing cognitive skills.

As a student/researcher, I have been taking exams myself on a website called CITI Training. This is on various topics, overall it is in reference to research in general and the safety of all participants.

My research project focuses on the performance monitoring skills of  children with language impairments. Prior research has shown that cognitive abilities are linked to language expression and comprehension and  that  children with language impairments  have difficulties with nonverbal cognition, specifically working memory and executive functions, in addition to their language deficits. .The purpose of this project is to focus on one specific cognitive skill, performance monitoring, to determine if children with language impairments behavior similarly to their peers after making an error. Within this research project Professor Scheuer and I will be testing children with and without speech language impairments to seeif children with language impairments have difficulty with non-verbal cognition.

I expect to discover more in depth the many ways children think and learn. Also this research should help clarify if cognitive goals should be added to a Speech-Language Pathologist’s therapy process as well as the typical language goals.

Professor Scheuer and I hope to test 40 typically developed adolescents and 20 adolescents with language impairments. These children will be from the ages of 8-14. We will be using accepted psychological experiments well-used in previous adult studies and adapting them for children.