Journal Article

Statistical learning as a window into developmental disabilities

Saffran, Jenny R.

2018

Overview

Until recently, most behavioral studies of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) have used standardized assessments as a means to probe etiology and to characterize phenotypes. Over the past decade, however, tasks originally developed to investigate learning processes in typical development have been brought to bear on developmental processes in children with IDD. This brief review will focus on one learning process in particular—statistical learning—and will provide an overview of what has been learned thus far from studies using statistical learning tasks with different groups of children with IDD conditions. While a full picture is not yet available, results to date suggest that studies of learning are both feasible and informative about learning processes that may differ across diagnostic groups, particularly as they relate to language acquisition. More generally, studies focused on learning processes may be highly informative about different developmental trajectories both across groups and within groups of children.

• Publisher: BioMed Central,BioMed Central Ltd,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
• Subject: Autism / Behavior / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Biomedicine / Child development / Children / Cognition & reasoning / Cognitive ability / Developmental disabilities / Developmental Disabilities - complications / Developmental Disabilities - diagnosis / Developmental Disabilities - psychology / Developmental language disorder / Developmental processes / Disability studies / Dyslexia / Educational activities / Etiology / Groups / Human Genetics / Humans / Hypotheses / IDDRC 2018 / Intellectual Disability - complications / Intellectual Disability - diagnosis / Intellectual Disability - psychology / Language / Language acquisition / Language Development / Language Development Disorders - complications / Language Development Disorders - diagnosis / Language Development Disorders - psychology / Language disorders / Learning / Learning processes / Native language acquisition / Native languages / Neurology / Neuropsychology / Neurosciences / Pediatrics / People with disabilities / Phenotypes / Psychiatry / Review / Second language learning / Speech / Statistics / Statistics as Topic / Williams syndrome