Metalinguistic Awareness in Normal and Language-Disordered Children

The purpose of this study was to better understand the relationship between delayed linguistic performance and metalinguistic abilities. A metalinguistic task involving the identification and revision of syntactic, semantic, and phonologic errors was administered to 10 normal and 10 language-disordered children of comparable mental age and receptive language abilities. The two groups performed similarly in identifying and correcting semantic and phonologic errors. However, the language-disordered children performed significantly poorer than the normal children in identifying and correcting syntactic errors. These findings suggest that not only do language-disordered children take longer to understand and produce certain language forms, but they also take longer to access this knowledge once it is acquired.