Anticipatory imagery ability in normal and language-disabled children.

The literature on cognitive functioning of language-disabled children suggests that they exhibit specific disabilities in nonlinguistic as well as linguistic domains. These disabilities have been hypothesized to be related to deficits in cognitive representational ability. Anticipatory imagery and spatial representation have been reported as two nonlinguistic representational areas in which language-disordered children are deficient. The present study compared normal and language-disabled children on spatial representation tasks involving anticipatory imagery. Five spatial tasks were administered to two groups of 7 1/2-9 1/2-year-old children matched on sex, age, native language, and racial background. One group included 18 language-disabled children and the other group 18 children with normal language development. The language-disabled were less accurate than the normal children on all tasks which involved anticipation or prediction of mental rotations, movements, or other transformations. The results of this study suggest difficulty with dynamic cognitive representation in the linguistic and nonlinguistic deficits demonstrated by language-disabled children.