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.