Investigating the impact of prosodic complexity on the speech of children with Specific Language Impairment *

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have difficulty with, amongst other things, non-word repetition tasks. This paper presents preliminary research into the nature of the phonological deficit in SLI. We report results from four SLI children tested on a new set of non-words which, unlike previous sets, takes metrical and syllabic complexity into account. Most errors occur in non-words with adjoined syllables. The implications of this finding for the nature of the phonological deficit in SLI, and its possible impact on syntactic and morphological abilities, are discussed.