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The repertoire and timing of gestures accompanying speech were compared in children with specific language impairment (SLI), aged 5-10 years, in typically developing peers (CA), individually matched on age and nonverbal IQ, and in younger language-matched (LM) children. They were videotaped in two tasks, recounting a cartoon and describing their classroom. Three types of gestures were coded -iconics, deictics and beats -and the synchrony of these gestures with speech was examined in terms of number of words encompassed, grammatical speech category at gesture onset, and relationship of iconic gestures to the concept expressed in speech. All groups used more deictic gestures in the classroom description task. SLI children differed from the comparison children only in their use of iconic gestures. They produced somewhat more of these, used them more often to replace words, and began them more often on a noun phrase object. Otherwise, language proficiency, at least as measured by standardized tests, did not appear to impact the gestural system. The fact that, for all groups, most iconic and deictic gestures began on the noun phrase subject indicates a close synchrony between gesture and speech onset.

Preschool children, aged 2 to 5 years, were given a memory task that required them to repeat a list of animal names and a sentence imitation task. A sample of their spontaneous speech was also recorded. Word span was found to predict sentence imitation scores across the whole preschool age range. Word span and chronological age (CA), together, also predicted the mean length of utterance in spontaneous speech in younger preschool children. In a replication with children aged 2 to 3 years, word span predicted mean length or utterance (MLU) better than both CA and mental age (MA). These results extend previous findings regarding the relationship between word span and language imitation to younger preschool children. They also support the notion of a memory constraint on early spontaneous language. Increasing mastery of linguistic rules appears to obviate a memory constraint on spontaneous language, at least with these measures.

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