Sensitivity to word order cues by normal and language/learning disabled adults

Sixteen adults with language/learning disabilities (L/LD) and 16 adults who lacked a personal or familial history of L/LD participated in a study designed to test sensitivity to word order cues that signaled grammatical versus ungrammatical word strings belonging to an artificial grammar. In an exposure phase, participants heard word strings constructed of novel CVC words for a period of 5 min. In a test phase, participants were asked to judge new sentences as either obeying or violating the rules of the grammar they heard. L/LD participants performed significantly below the comparison group on this task. The results suggest that this skill, which emerges early in life for normal children, is problematic for adults with L/LD. Learning outcomes: The reader will become familiar with a paradigm that allows assessment of rapid learning of word order rules and how this learning differs for normal and language/learning disabled adults. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.