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Sentence comprehension strategies in specifically language impaired children *
Author(s) -
Lely Heather,
Dewart Hazel
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
international journal of language and communication disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.101
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1460-6984
pISSN - 1368-2822
DOI - 10.3109/13682828609019843
Subject(s) - comprehension , psychology , sentence , vocabulary , specific language impairment , language disorder , linguistics , noun , word order , semantics (computer science) , cognitive psychology , cognition , computer science , philosophy , neuroscience , programming language
This study investigated sentence comprehension and the use of sentence comprehension strategies by specifically language impaired children. Eleven specifically language impaired (SLI) children (aged 4;0 to 6;0), chosen according to strict criteria, were compared with eleven children matched on chronological age and eleven language controls matched on the receptive scores from the Reynell Developmental Language Scale and the British Picture Vocabulary Scale. Subjects acted out active and passive voice sentences that had either a positive or negative semantic bias or were unbiased semantically. The SLI children performed at a signficantly lower level than both the age and language control subjects. They relied more heavily on semantic cues than the language control children and all eleven consistently applied a ‘probable event strategy’. Word order responses that took the first noun to be the actor were used with equal frequency by SLI children and language controls. However, these responses were used less discriminately by the SLI children than the language controls who applied them more frequently to active voice sentences than to passives. The results suggest that the SLI children primarily based their interpretation on semantic expectations or the sequence of content words and relied little on syntactic information.