Lexico-semantic processing in children with specific language impairment: The overactivation hypothesis

The hypothesis indicating an overactivation of the lexico-semantic network in children with specific language impairment (SLI) was tested using an auditory pair-primed paradigm (PPP), where participants made a lexical-decision on the second word of a noun pair that could be semantically related, or not, to the first one. Though children with SLI were proven to be as accurate as children matched for receptive vocabulary age, they presented a larger priming effect in the PPP in terms of both reaction time and accuracy. These results preliminarily support the hypothesis of an overactivation of the lexico-semantic network.Learning outcomes: As a result of reading this paper the reader will be able to (1) understand how the pair-primed paradigm can contribute to investigate the online spreading of the activation within the lexico-semantic network; (2) be aware of the fact that during development it is unlikely that some cognitive domain are completely typical (residual normality), while others develop atypically; (3) the reader will be aware that children with SLI present some subtle abnormalities in the lexico-semantic network, which appears to be overactive.