Probing morphological, syntactic and pragmatic knowledge through answers to wh-questions in children with SLI

Abstract

The experiment revealed that children with SLI did well on syntactic and pragmatic measures. The greatest challenge was in providing tense-related morphemes in their answers to questions.

Specific Language Impairment, Autism Spectrum Disorders and Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorders: Is There Overlap in Language Deficits? A Review

“…Gibson et al, 2013), others say that the screening of pragmatic skills while evaluating the communication skills of individuals with SLI should be seriously considered (Osman et al, 2011). In fact, there are some pragmatic skills that are affected in individuals with SLI (or DLD), as the maxim of quantity in sentence answers to 'wh' questions (Rombough & Thornton, 2018). Also, Katsos et al (2011) confirmed that children with SLI do face difficulties in employing the maxim of informativeness as well as in understanding the logical meaning of quantifiers, and that these difficulties accompany their overall language difficulties.…”

“…SLI has been traditionally characterised as a deficit of structural language (specifically grammar) (Davies et al, 2016). Children with SLI frequently omit tense-related morphemes (Rombough & Thornton, 2018) and present weaknesses in noun and verb inflections at 5 years old. At pre-school age, number agreement is a major challenge for children with SLI, with difficulties especially in oral production of 'quantifier + noun', compared to 'determiner + noun' (Rice & Oetting, 1993).…”