Syntactic and Semantic Aspects of the Utterances of Language - Impaired Children : The Same Can Be Less

Although language-impaired children have been observed to follow many nor­ mal language acquisition patterns, research to date has not fully explored the re­ lationships between various linguistic domains. The hypotheses investigated in this study are that language-impaired children produce fewer logical proposi­ tions per utterance and evidence less control of formal syntactic markers. lan­ guage samples from 10 language-impaired children (M CA. = 59.35 months) and 10 normal children (M CA. = 36 months) matched for MlU (4.17-5.48) were analyzed for semantic and syntactic characteristics. Both hypotheses were confirmed. Despite similar utterance length, the language-impaired children ex­ pressed fewer propositions per utterance and made more syntactic errors than the younger normal group. Because, in many other respects, children in the two groups produced equivalent language, the data imply asynchronous develop­ ment across linguistic domains for the language-impaired group. They also sug­ gest difficulties with sentence formulation, symbolic thought, and the learning of syntactic elements. Finally, the data raise important questions about the validity of an MlU-match.