PURPOSE The validity of the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough, 1990) for children who speak African American English (AAE) was evaluated by conducting an item analysis and a comparison of the children's scores as a function of their maternal education level, nonmainstream dialect density, age, and clinical status. METHOD The data were language samples from 62 children; 52 of the ...

PURPOSE This study investigated inference construction within spoken narratives in adolescents with varying cognitive and language abilities, using W. Kintsch's (1988) construction-integration model as a framework. The role of working memory in inference construction was examined along with language and nonverbal cognition. METHOD Participants were 527 eighth-grade students in 4 diagnostic gr...

Purpose: We investigated lexical representations of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing chronological age-matched (CA) peers on a frequency manipulated gating task. We tested the hypothesis that children with SLI have holistic phonological representations of words, i.e. that children with SLI would exhibit smaller effects of neighborhood density on gating d...

Maillart and Parisse found out that French children with specific language impairment (SLI) presented strong difficulties in phonology when compared with normally-developing children matched by MLU (NLD). Some of the youngest children from this study were followed to provide developmental information about their language deficit. Children were tested again in the same way as before (free sponta...

The lexical retrieval ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical language development was compared. Fifty Hebrew-speaking children participated: 15 school-age with SLI, 20 typically developing, matched on age to the SLI group and 15 younger, typically developing matched on naming performance to the SLI group. Participants were tested in a sentence comp...

Computer use draws on linguistic abilities. Using this medium thus presents challenges for young people with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and raises questions of whether computer-based tasks are appropriate for them. We consider theoretical arguments predicting impaired performance and negative outcomes relative to peers without SLI versus the possibility of positive gains. We examine the...

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...

BACKGROUND Specific language impairment (SLI) occurs in 2% to 8% of preschool children. Major and candidate genes are probably involved. Genetic drift is a cause for the presence of high frequencies of deleterious alíeles of a specific disease and the founder effect is one of its forms. Robinson Crusoe Island has 633 inhabitants and its actual population began with 8 families that repopulated t...

Early second language (EL2) learners generally perform more poorly than monolinguals in specific language domains, presenting similarities with children affected by specific language impairment (SLI). As a consequence, it can be difficult to correctly diagnose this disorder in EL2 children. The current study investigated the performance of 120 EL2 and 40 age-matched monolingual children in obje...

English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) are known to have particular difficulty with the acquisition of grammatical morphemes that carry tense and agreement features, such as the past tense -ed and third-person singular present -s. In this study, an Extended Optional Infinitive (EOI) account of SLI is evaluated. In this account, -ed, -s, BE, and DO are regarded as fini...