Management of cohesion in the written productions of monolingual Persian-speaking students with specific language disorder

Introduction: Students with specific language impairment (SLI) have many difficulties in producing coherent written texts The goal of this study was to investigate and compare the management of cohesion in the written production of individuals with SLI and their normal peers in terms of density and diversity of connectives, the density of punctuation marks (periods and commas) and density and diversity of anaphors. Materials and Methods: 24 students with SLI as an experimental group and 24 normal developing students as a control group was asked to write stories about contentious situations situated at school. Then, their written productions were transcribed and analyzed linguistically based on the density and the diversity of three cohesive devices: connectives, punctuation marks, and anaphors. Results: The findings of the study showed that in the SLI group, the density (P=0.005), and the diversity of (P=0.005), and in the normally developing group the diversity of connectives (P=0.02) have significantly increased with increasing age.  The density (P=0.03) of the connectives used by the SLI group and their diversity (P=0.02) was significantly lower than the density and the diversity of those used by the normal developing students. In the normally developing group, the density of comma increased significantly with increasing age (P=0.001). The density of commas used by normal developing students was significantly higher than the density of that in SLI students. The density of anaphors was significantly increased with increasing age in the SLI group (P=0.001). In contrast, the diversity of anaphors significantly increased with increasing age (P=0.02) in the normally developing group. The differences between the SLI group and the normal developing students were significant only in children (P=0.01). Conclusion: The results of the study showed that children with SLI have difficulties in the management of cohesion in the written texts.