What compound words mean to children with specific language impairment

Abstract

Sixteen children (17 age mates, 17 vocabulary mates) with specific language impairment (SLI) participated in two studies. In the first, they named fantasy objects. All groups coined novel noun–noun compounds on a majority of trials but only the SLI group had difficulty ordering the nouns as dictated by semantic context. In the second study, the children described the meaning of conventional noun–noun compounds. The SLI and AM groups did not differ in parsing the nouns, but the SLI group was poorer at explaining the semantic relationships between them. Compared to vocabulary mates, a larger proportion of the SLI group successfully parsed the compounds but a smaller proportion could explain them. These difficulties may reflect problems in the development of links within the semantic lexicon.

Using Ratings to Gain Insight Into Conceptual Development

“…Sheng and McGregor (2010) found a range of abilities in lexical-semantic organization for 7-year-old children with SLI, and identified a subgroup with significant impairment in this skill set that was associated with word-finding deficits. McGregor, Rost, Guo and Sheng (2010) found semantic deficits in school-aged children with SLI in terms of their ability to use appropriate, semantically-dictated word order and explain the meaning of novel compound words. McGregor, Newman, Reilly and Capone (2002) have also found that naming errors were associated with less richly encoded semantic information.…”

Lexical Processing in School-Age Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Children with Specific Language Impairment: The Role of Semantics

“…Although lexical deficits in some children with ASD and SLI have been identified, only a few previous studies explored the underlying semantic organization in children with ASD and SLI (Battaglia, 2013; McGregor et al, 2012; McGregor, Rost, Guo, & Sheng, 2010). For example, McGregor and colleagues (2010) investigated how children organize and relate words to one another.…”

“…For example, McGregor and colleagues (2010) investigated how children organize and relate words to one another. They examined whether children understood the semantic relationship between the modifier and the head in compound words by asking children to make up compound names to describe pictures; children were also asked to parse and explain compound words.…”

“…Although children with SLI performed fairly well overall, they had difficulties ordering compound words compared to vocabulary-matched children and chronologically age-matched children. Additionally, children with SLI produced poorer explanations of the modifier-head relationships than the typically developing children in both comparison groups (McGregor et al, 2010). In a repeated word association study, Sheng and McGregor (2010) examined the accessibility of semantic information in children's semantic networks.…”

(Dis)connections between specific language impairment and dyslexia in Chinese

“…Morphological-awareness deficits have indeed been linked with SLI in English (Oetting & Rice, 1993;Smith-Lock, 1995;Van der Lely & Christian, 2000). On morphological construction tasks similar to that used in Cantonese Chinese (constructing novel word compounds such as ghost-camel), English-speaking children with SLI performed significantly worse than their controls, particularly in the correct ordering of the root noun and modifier (Grela, Synder, & Hiramatsu, 2005;McGregor, Rost, Guo, & Sheng, 2010). In Cantonese Chinese, children with co-morbid SLI-D or SLI-only also perform worse than those with normal language on morphological construction (Wong et al, 2010).…”