Divided attention in children with and without SLI.
Item
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Title
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Divided attention in children with and without SLI.
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Identifier
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AAI3245071
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identifier
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3245071
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Creator
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Munger, Carol P.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Richard G. Schwartz
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Speech Communication | Psychology, Cognitive | Language, Linguistics | Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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Attention is the ability to maintain focus on a particular stimulus. Selective attention permits an individual to concentrate on one stimulus while ignoring others. If opposing stimuli come into the attentional field, attention to the primary stimulus is reduced. When attention is divided, resources are allocated to two or more competing stimuli. The aspect of attention most related to the allocation of processing resources is divided attention (DA). There are finite resources available for processing and storage (Pashler, 1999).;The present study investigated recall of words and nonwords in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) when there was an additional, competing task. The children with typical language development (TLD) ranged in age from 8;2 to 10;8. Six children with SLI ranged in age from 9;4 to 14;9. The DA encoding phase required listening to stimuli while executing a secondary visual-motor task. Each child was then asked to recall the stimulus items. DA at the retrieval phase required listening to the stimuli followed by recall while executing the secondary task.;Children with TLD children demonstrated different response patterns compared to adults. Word recall for DA attention tasks consumed more resources. The SLI children were able to accomplish all tasks presented and performed similarly to the TLD group. The percent of items correct on all measures, however, was lower for SLI children. As with adults, the encoding condition was most detrimental to recall for all participants. Performance on the secondary task suffered on both DA conditions for all children. The children with SLI were more similar to an adult study of older subjects aged 60 and 70 (Anderson, Craik, Naveh-Benjamin, 1998), who allocated more resources for retrieval than was required by younger adults.;DA at encoding caused a decrease in memory performance with some reduction in reaction time for the secondary task. Memory was less affected by DA at the retrieval stage. More costs to memory recall were incurred at the encoding stage because the secondary task interfered with a controlled process. Conversely, memory recall at retrieval appeared to be automatic suffering less from interference (Anderson et al., 1998; Craik et al., 1998).
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
