This study tested the procedural deficit hypothesis of specific language impairment (SLI) by comparing children's performance in two motor procedural learning tasks and an implicit verbal sequence learning task. Participants were 7- to 11-year-old children with SLI (n = 48), typically developing age-matched children (n = 20) and younger typically developing children matched for receptive gramma...

Purpose: The goals of this investigation were to determine whether treatment assists children with specific language impairment (SLI) in the use of grammatical morphemes that mark tense and agreement and whether treatment gains influence the children’s use of other, untreated morphemes. Method: Twenty-five children with SLI participated in 96 intervention sessions designed to facilitate the chi...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have a deficit in processing a sequence of two visual stimuli (S1 and S2) presented at different inter-stimulus intervals and in different spatial locations. In particular, the core of this study is to investigate whether S1 identification is disrupted due to a retroactive interference of S2. To th...

PURPOSE The mean length of children's utterances is a valuable estimate of their early language acquisition. The available normative data lack documentation of language and nonverbal intelligence levels of the samples. This study reports age-referenced mean length of utterance (MLU) data from children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children without language impairments. METHOD Of...

In 1990, CAST (classification of audiograms by sequential testing) was proposed and developed as an automated, innovative approach to screening infant hearing using a modified Bayesian method. The method generated a four-frequency audiogram in a minimal number of test trials using VRA (visual reinforcement audiometry) techniques. Computer simulations were used to explore the properties (efficie...

The aim of this study was to uncover factors accounting for the ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) to learn agreement morphemes in intervention. Twenty-five children with SLI who participated in a six-month intervention program focused on teaching third person singular -s or auxiliary is/are/was showed a wide range of use of the target morpheme after intervention. Regre...

This investigation assessed the effectiveness of a phonological intervention program on the brain functioning of bilingual Finnish 6- to 7-year-old preschool children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI). The intervention program was implemented by preschool teachers to small groups of children including children with SLI. A matched group of other bilingual children with SLI receiv...

PURPOSE We investigated claims that specific language impairment (SLI) typically arises from nonspeech auditory deficits by measuring tone-in-noise thresholds in a relatively homogeneous SLI subgroup exhibiting a primary deficit restricted to grammar (Grammatical[G]-SLI). METHOD Fourteen children (mostly teenagers) with G-SLI were compared to age-, vocabulary-, and grammar-matched control chi...

BACKGROUND The ability of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) to use and comprehend closed-class words. AIM Acknowledging the increasing search for the characterization of linguistic performance of this population in different languages, as well as the findings of international literature that stress the difficulty of these children in using closed-class grammatical morphemes, th...

PURPOSE The author examined the influence of sentence type, clause order, and verb transitivity on the accuracy of children's past tense productions. All groups of children, but especially children with specific language impairment (SLI), were predicted to decrease accuracy as linguistic complexity increased. METHOD The author elicited past tense productions in 2-clause sentences from 5- to 8...