Memory functioning and mental verbs acquisition in children with specific language impairment George C. Spanoudis *, Demetrios Natsopoulos University of Cyprus, Cyprus 1. Introduction The term specific language impairment (SLI) refers to a constellation of various deficits which cover a wide spectrum of disorders, such as phonology, lexicon, syntax, pragmatics, memory or a combination of these (Bishop, 1997; Leonard, 1998). More than three decades of intensive research has demonstrated that children with developmental language disorders display diminished language skills despite having normal non-verbal intelligence and hearing, and no signs of neurological impairments, behavioural or social. The present study aimed to investigate the relationship of memory functioning and mental verb acquisition in Greek-speaking children, providing evidence from another language and, thus, enriching the current literature relative to language disorders mostly confined to English-speaking children. Research on SLI has accumulated a bulk of evidence which covers a wide spectrum of linguistic phenomena at receptive and expressive levels. A number of representative studies indicated that children with SLI are deficient in phonology (Munson, Kurtz, & Windsor, 2005); less able to acquire lexicon (McGregor, Newman, Reilly, & Capone, 2002; Moyle, Ellis Weismer, Evans, & Lindstrom, 2007); less apt to understand sentence structure and/or sentential semantics (Bishop & Norbury, 2002; Montgomery, 2004; van der Lely, 2005); less capable to use morphosyntactic information (Leonard, Eyer, Bedore, & Grela, 1997; Rice, Tomblin, Hoffman, Richman, & Marquis, 2004); not able to appreciate pragmatics (Bishop & Norbury, 2002); and less efficient at comprehending and retrieving text (Norbury & Bishop, 2003). Research in Developmental Disabilities 32 (2011) 2916–2926 A R T I C L E I N F O Article history: Received 7 April 2011 Received in revised form 14 April 2011 Accepted 5 May 2011 Available online 8 June 2011 Keywords: Memory functioning Mental verbs acquisition Specific language impairment A B S T R A C T Memory and language operate in synergy. Recent literature stresses the importance of memory functioning in interpreting language deficits. Two groups of 50 children each, ages 8–12 were studied. The first group included children with specific language impairment, while the participants in the second group were typically developing children. The two groups, which were matched on age, nonverbal intelligence and varied significantly in verbal ability were examined, using a test battery of four memory functioning (phonological, working and long-term memory) and five mental verb measures. The statistical analyses indicated that the two groups differed significantly in all language and memory measures; a logistic regression analysis revealed that within each main group existed nested subgroups of different developmental patterns with working and long-term memory measures as the most robust discriminate markers of classification. Language impaired children had more difficulties in the acquisition of mental verbs because they are less able to process and store phonological information in working memory and long-term lexicon. ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author at: University of Cyprus, Kallipoleos 75, P.O. Box 20537, 1678 Nicosia, Cyprus. Tel.: +357 22 892069; fax: +357 22 892071. E-mail address: spanoud@ucy.ac.cy (G.C. Spanoudis). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Research in Developmental Disabilities 0891-4222/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.05.011