Elina Mainela-Arnold, Ph.D.
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison , 2005
Assistant Professor
Contact Information
401K Ford Building
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16802
(814) 863-6248
Fax: (814) 863-3759
Courses Taught
CSD 462 Language Disorders in Children
Research Interests
Cognitive mechanisms involved in language acquisition, the way in which these mechanisms interact with environmental input, and how this interaction might help explain individual differences with language ability, especially in individuals with low language abilities, such as children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Relationship between working memory and lexical frequency distributions, children's ability to extract and store regularities in verbal and nonverbal input, children's problem solving strategies revealed in speech and gesture.
Member of the Center for Language Science
Examples of Collaborative Projects
The impact of lexical representations on performance on working memory tasks in children with SLI in collaboration with Julia Evans & Maryellen MacDonald. This project investigates the impact of lexical representations on performance on working memory tasks by children with SLI. Many current theories of SLI are influenced by working memory models which argue that individual differences in language ability are explained by differences in working memory capacity (Ellis Weismer et al., 1999). These theories place an emphasis on reduced working memory capacity as the underlying impairment in SLI . However, it is unclear whether individual differences in performance on working memory tasks are due to differences in total working memory capacity or differences in efficiency of linguistic operations (Just & Carpenter, 1992). MacDonald and Christiansen (2002) further proposed that the human language processing architecture is such that processing capacity and linguistic representations cannot vary independently, and that individual differences in language processing can be explained by differences in language experience and biological neural network architecture rather than differences in working memory capacity. Although there is evidence linking SLI with reduced performance on working memory tasks, it is still unclear if reduced working memory capacity is the cause of these children's language difficulties or if their weak language representations lead to poor performance on working memory tasks.
A group of children with SLI and their age-matched peers performed three different lexical tasks and a frequency manipulated working memory task (Frequency Manipulated Sentence Span, FMSS). The FMSS task was modeled after the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT, Gaulin & Campbell, 1994) which is commonly used to measure verbal working memory in children, but we modified the words for estimates of frequency with which they occur in English. The results provided some evidence for the notion that children with SLI are not able to utilize lexical knowledge drawn from environmental language input, as estimated by different frequency counts, to the degree that their age matched peers do. This suggests that stronger lexical representations in typically developing children gave them an advantage in the FMSS task as compared to children with SLI. These results support the idea that group differences in performance on working memory tasks may be explained, in part, by differences in lexical processing. (Funded by NIH F31 DC 6536, Mainela-Arnold, PI, Evans mentor)
Nonverbal task representations revealed in speech and gesture in children with SLI in collaboration with Julia Evans & Martha Alibali. The second line of my research investigates nonverbal problem solving and gesturing in children with SLI. This line of research started from a realization that even though these children are not cognitively disabled, their performance on some nonverbal tasks often can appear different from their peers. This line has been influenced by investigations on typically developing children's changing representations of the Piagetian conservation task (e.g. Alibali et al., 2001). To solve a conservation task correctly, the child has to ignore the currently present external perceptual features and rely on internal knowledge of transformations (Piaget, 1965). Johnston (2004) recently extended the idea of weak representations in SLI to nonverbal cognitive areas as well. She proposes that difficulty in representing knowledge in nonverbal tasks leads to incorrect answers by these children. Children with SLI may be slower to develop and utilize internal knowledge representations. Therefore, the difficulties experienced by children with SLI may reflect their reliance on the external perceptual features of the task.
We investigated this hypothesis directly by analyzing these children's explanations of their reasoning in spoken language and gesture. In spoken language, a group of children with SLI expressed significantly fewer explanations focusing on internal knowledge than the age-matched peer group. This suggests that the SLI group's representations of the conservation task were more influenced by external features than their peers. However, in knowledge conveyed in gesture, the two groups did not differ significantly in the types of explanations that were expressed. It could be that this is because children with SLI rely on gesture to augment communication. However, the children with SLI did not express more internal knowledge in gesture than younger conservation and language matched children. This indicates that it is difficult to express internal explanations in gesture, rather than that children with SLI “had” internal representations comparable to age matched peers, but were able to express them only in gesture. Past research on typically developing children has shown that gesturing promotes focus on external features suggesting that using gesture to augment communication may lead these children into a qualitatively different path in cognitive development (Alibali et al. 2001). Thus using gesture to augment communication in the conservation task may actually focus attention on “misleading” cues in the environment. (Funded by Spencer Foundation S133-DK59 , Evans & Alibali PIs)
Procedural learning in adolescents with and without SLI in collaboration with Bruce Tomblin. This project continues my line of research focusing on nonverbal deficits in SLI. We have been investigating procedural learning of visual spatial sequences in children with and without SLI. The conservation study led me to believe that the ability to form solid, detailed mental representations in children with SLI is reduced when compared to peers, even in some nonverbal areas. One mechanism that might explain this difficulty in forming mental representations is the ability to derive pattern regularities in the environment. Consistent with what has been proposed by Ullman and Peirpont (2005), we are finding that children with SLI are slower to track pattern regularities in visual spatial input in a serial response time task that does not involve overt auditory, linguistic, or working memory demands. This indicates that one cognitive mechanism that explains differences in language learning skills may involve the ability to compute and track dependences between sequential elements in the environmental. This mechanism must be involved in brain systems that are shared by the visual and auditory system as well as possibly motor systems. (Funded by NIH P50 DC 2746, Tomblin, PI)
Recent Publications
Mainela-Arnold, E., Evans, J., & Coady, J. (in press). Lexical representations in children with SLI: Evidence from a frequency manipulated gating task. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research .
Tomblin, J.B, Mainela-Arnold, E., & Zhang, X. (2007). Procedural learning in adolescents with and without specific language impairment. Language Learning and Development, 3, 269-293 .
Coady, J., Evans, J., Mainela-Arnold, E. & Klunder, K. (2007). Children with specific language impairments perceive speech most categorically when tokens are natural and meaningful. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 41-57.
Mainela-Arnold, E., Evans, J. & Alibali, M. (2006.) Understanding conservation delays in children with SLI: Task representations revealed in speech and gesture. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49, 1267-1279.