Structural priming in children with and without specific language impairment.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE To determine if structural priming can be demonstrated in young children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). RESEARCH DESIGN A mixed-model design was used to compare children with SLI to two groups of typically developing (TD) children, and to compare priming conditions. METHODS AND PROCEDURES Eighteen children with SLI and 36 TD children (18 matched on age and 18 matched on MLU) participated. Children were asked to describe drawings compatible with both a transitive or an intransitive sentence structure, after being primed with one of the structures. RESULTS All groups of children were more likely to produce transitive sentences when they had just heard and repeated a transitive prime. Children with SLI did not differ from the other groups. CONCLUSIONS Children with SLI show similar priming effects to TD children. Priming has promise as a method for investigating production factors in typical and atypical language development.