Temporal Processing Skills of Children with and without Specific Language Impairment

This paper compares the temporal processing skills of 6- to 9-year-old children meeting criteria for enrolment in specific language impairment (SLI) special classes to controls. Children were tested on two temporal-order judgment tasks (TOJ) and one interval-production task with 31 finger taps at a rate of 1 tap/s. Nonverbal IQ (NVIQ) was assessed using the Block Design subtest of the WISC-III. In a visual task (V-TOJ), children indicated which of two flashes, left or right, appeared first; and, in a bimodal task (B-TOJ), they indicated which signal, a sound or a light, appeared first. In the production task, groups were compared on mean production interval, the variability of produced intervals and the coefficient of variation. The results indicate a weaker capacity of children with SLI to determine the order of arrival of sensory signals in both TOJ tasks, and more variability (and higher coefficient of variation) of children from the same group in the production task. Furthermore, there were no group differences on NVIQ. Binary logistic regression revealed that performance on the V-TOJ task is sufficient to predict group membership with a 78% accuracy rate.