Picture Naming in Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment: An Error Analysis Study

Objectives: The lexical-level deficits are one of the hallmark limitations observed in early school-age children with specific language impairment. These problems are the predictors of reading problems and poor performance at school. Most studies in Persian-speaker children with specific language impairment have focused on syntax and morphology and the naming errors profile of these children are overlooked. This study aimed to investigate the naming accuracy, latency, and the error profile of these children. Methods: This was an observational study. Twenty children with specific language impairment were selected according to the clinical judgment of two speech therapists from speech therapy clinics and 100 children with typical language development aged from 7 to 9 years were randomly selected from public schools. The Persian picture naming set was presented by DMDX for the examination of picture naming skills. Naming errors were categorized as semantic, formal, mixed, non-word, unrelated, and others errors. Then, the data were investigated in terms of descriptive statistics and analysis of differences by the Independent t test and Mann-Whitney U test. Results: The Persian-speaker children with specific language impairment name significantly slower and less accurate than the children compared to children with normal language development (P≤0.05). Although semantic errors were the most frequent errors in the two groups, the score differences of formal and omission errors were significant between the groups (P≤0.05). Discussion: The different naming accuracy and latency scores between the two groups may be due to language delay and the inefficiency of the semantic system in children with specific language impairment. There are a variety of word retrieval errors in Persian-speaker children. Although, there are differences between the two groups, the error type in picture naming cannot be used for differentiating between them.