Positive Effect of Visuospatial Training on Children with SLI

Background: it was shown that children with specific language impairments (SLI) have deficits not only in grammar understanding but also in visuospatial abilities (Kiselev et al., 2016). We have shown that visuospatial training has positive effect on the language abilities in children with SLI (Kiselev et al., 2018). Is there the long-term effect of this training?

Objective: the goal of this study was to reveal the effect of visuospatial training on grammar understanding in children with SLI one year after the completion of training.

Participants and Methods: the participants were 20 children aged 6–7 years (mean age = 6.5) with SLI. Children were included and randomly assigned to treatment conditions according to a 2×2 cross-over design. Children from intervention group participated in 36 weeks of visuospatial training. Training included different visuospatial exercises both on motor and cognitive level. We used three subtests from Luria’s child neuropsychological assessment battery to assess grammar understanding in SLI children. Effects of treatment were analyzed by means of an ANOVA for repeated measurements.

Results: the ANOVA has revealed (p<.05) that for grammar understanding subtests from Luria’s child neuropsychological assessment battery the visuospatial training was superior to the motor training, with effect sizes in the medium-to-high range (0.60-0.89).

Conclusion: the findings from this study suggest that visuospatial training has positive effect on grammar understanding in children with SLI one year after the completion of training. However, we need to do further investigations to prove the effectiveness of this training for children with SLI.