Background and aimsImplicit learning mechanisms associated with detecting structural regularities have been proposed to underlie both the long-term acquisition of linguistic structure and a short-term tendency to repeat linguistic structure across sentences (structural priming) in typically developing children. Recent research has suggested that a deficit in such mechanisms may explain the inconsistent trajectory of language learning displayed by children with Developmental Learning Disorder. We used a structural priming paradigm to investigate whether a group of children with Developmental Learning Disorder showed impaired implicit learning of syntax (syntactic priming) following individual syntactic experiences, and the time course of any such effects.MethodsFive- to six-year-old Italian-speaking children with Developmental Learning Disorder and typically developing age-matched and language-matched controls played a picture-description-matching game with an experimenter. The experimenter’s descriptions ...
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