Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Accounts of abstract word learning suggest that learning thesewords relies primarily on access to linguistic cues, such as thestatistical co-occurrence of words with similar semanticproperties. Thus, children with language impairment (LI),who by definition have impoverished access to linguisticcontext, should have disproportionate impairments in abstractword knowledge. Here, we compared verbal definitions andlexical decisions to both abstract and concrete words ofchildren with LI (ages 8 to 13) and both age-matched andvocabulary-matched typically developing (TD) peers. Relativeto age-matched peers, children with LI had significant deficitsin both tasks. Crucially, however, there was not greaterimpairment of abstract words. We conclude that that linguisticknowledge is not a sine qua non to learning abstract wordsand concepts and other mechanisms, which are notspecifically impaired in LI, are at play.