Purpose-Information-processing limitations have been associated with language problems in children with specific language impairment (SLI). These processing limitations may be associated with limitations in attentional capacity even in the absence of clinically significant attention deficits. In the current study, the authors examine the performance of four-to six-year old children with SLI and their typically-developing (TD) peers on a visual sustained attention task. It was predicted that the children with SLI would demonstrate lower levels of performance in the absence of clinically significant attention deficits.Method-A visual Continuous Performance Task (CPT) was used to assess sustained attention in 13 children with SLI (M = 62.07 months) and 13 TD age-matched controls (M = 62.92 months). All children were screened for normal vision, hearing, and attention. Accuracy (d') and response time were analyzed to see if this sustained attention task could differentiate between the two groups.Results-The children with SLI were significantly less accurate but not significantly slower than the TD children on this test of visual sustained attention.Conclusion-Children with SLI may have reduced capacity for sustained attention in the absence of clinically significant attention deficits that could contribute over time to language learning difficulties.Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate marked language difficulties in the absence of typically associated factors such as hearing loss, neurological damage, or mental retardation (Leonard, 1998). Although these children have normal nonverbal IQ scores, researchers have found robust evidence of information processing deficits which may be attributed to limited working memory capacity (Bavin, Wilson, Maruff, & Sleeman, 2005;Ellis Weismer et al., 2000;Gillam, Cowan, & Marler, 1998;Hoffman & Gillam, 2004;Montgomery, 1995Montgomery, , 2000Montgomery, , 2003. In fact, Leonard et al. (2007) reported that the verbal working memory deficits exhibited by children with SLI accounted for a significant amount of the variance in composite language test scores.In the investigation of working memory in the larger population, a number of models (e.g., Baddeley, 2001Baddeley, , 2003Cowan, 1999Cowan, , 2001Cowan, , 2005 have identified attention as playing an important role in information processing. Attention is generally viewed as a limited-capacity system (e.g., Kahneman, 1973;Lavie, 2005;Lavie, Hirst, De Fockert, & Viding, 2004) composed of a number of different mechanisms including (but not exclusive to) sustained, selective, and divided attention (Leclercq, 2002). As attention is considered to be a limitedcapacity system, so are the mechanisms that are associated with attentional control in these models (e.g., the central executive [Baddeley, 2003], the focus of attention [Cowan, 2005] NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript has been proposed that individual variations in working memory are associated with variations in...

Difficulties with tense-related morphology may be compounded in children with SLI if they fail to make use of associations between the lexical aspect of verb predicates and the grammatical function of the accompanying inflections. The authors argue that the advantages of using these associations as a starting point in acquisition may be especially important in the case of -ed. Additional studies of children with SLI are clearly needed, including those that employ longitudinal, naturalistic data.

Background-Existing evidence suggests that young children with specific language impairment (SLI) have unusual difficulty detecting omissions of obligatory tense-marking morphemes, but little is known about adolescents' sensitivity to such violations.

Sixteen-year-olds with specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), and those showing typical language development (TD) responded to target words in sentences that were either grammatical or contained a grammatical error immediately before the target word. The TD participants showed the expected slower response times (RTs) when errors preceded the target word, regardless of error type. The SLI and NLI groups also showed the expected slowing, except when the error type involved the omission of a tense/agreement inflection. This response pattern mirrored an early developmental period of alternating between using and omitting tense/agreement inflections that is characteristic of SLI and NLI. The findings could not be readily attributed to factors such as insensitivity to omissions in general or insensitivity to the particular phonetic forms used to mark tense/agreement. The observed response pattern may represent continued difficulty with tense/ agreement morphology that persists in subtle form into adolescence.Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) have problems that are longstanding, with difficulties often extending through elementary school and into adolescence (Aram, Ekelman, & Nation, 1984;Bishop & Adams, 1990;Wulfeck, Bates, Krupa-Kwiatkowski, & Saltzman, 2004). Relative to typically developing same-age peers, school-aged children and adolescents with SLI show weaknesses in areas that include sentence repetition (Stothard, Snowling, Bishop, Chipchase, & Kaplan, 1998), sentence comprehension (Stark, Bernstein, Condino, Bender, Tallal, & Catts, 1984), word-finding (Johnson et al., 1999), and nonword repetition (Ellis Weismer, Tomblin, Zhang, Buckwalter, Chynotweth, & Jones, 2000), among others. Reading is also relatively weak in older children with SLI (Conti-Ramsden, Botting, Simkin, & Knox, 2001), and psychosocial outcomes are generally less favorable (Snowling, Bishop, Stothard, Chipchase, & Kaplan, 2006). Studies employing carefully constructed tasks of grammatical production and comprehension have revealed a variety of weaknesses in older children with SLI. These include the use of Whquestions (van der Lely & Battell, 2003), the assignment of thematic roles in relative clauses (Friedmann & Novogrodsky, 2007), and the comprehension of passives (van der Lely, 1996;Bishop, Bright, James, Bishop, & van der Lely, 2000). Investigators' interpretation of the available findings have differed in whether the evidence supports a deficit that is domain specific (e.g., van der Lely, Rosen, & McClelland, 1998) or one that crosses domains (e.g., Bishop et al., 2000).Whereas older children and adolescents with SLI present subtle symptoms of difficulties across a wide range of language areas, the linguistic profile of SLI is more uneven at younger ages. That is, although younger children with SLI often exhibit problems in a variety of areas of language, their difficulties with grammatical morphology are especially salient. The most commonly cited problems with grammati...

Background Many school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI)produce sentences that appear to conform to the adult grammar. It may be premature to conclude from this, however, that their language formulation ability is age appropriate. Aims In this study, we sought to determine whether a more subtle measure of language use, speech disruptions during sentence formulation, might serve to distinguish children with SLI from their typically-developing (TD) peers at an age when grammatical accuracy was high. We analyzed the rate of speech disruptions in simple sentence production in school-age children with SLI and TD age-matched peers. We predicted that (1) the SLI group would exhibit more speech disruptions than the TD group as a result of reduced language proficiency even when grammatical accuracy was high and, (2) the SLI group would demonstrate greater reductions in disruption frequency as compared to the TD group when given sentences that model the target syntactic structures. Methods & Procedures Twenty-eight children (17 SLI, 11 TD, M = 8;10 years) with no history of stuttering were presented with a series of picture pairs. The examiner described the first picture using a simple sentence and asked the child to repeat the sentence; the child then described the second picture. There were two priming conditions: Matching Syntax condition (paired pictures requiring the same syntactic structure) and Different Syntax condition (paired pictures requiring different syntactic structures). All testing was audio-recorded and speech disruptions (repetitions, revisions, fillers, long silent pauses) were transcribed and tabulated for each target response. The data were analyzed in an analysis of variance (ANOVA). Outcomes & Results T he SLI group demonstrated a significantly greater number of speech disruptions when compared to the TD group. There was no effect for priming. Conclusions & Implications School-age children with SLI appear to have difficulty with sentence formulation when compared to TD peers even when grammatical accuracy is high. We concluded that school-age children with SLI may demonstrate subtle but persistent language formulation difficulties.