This paper presents the first ever group study of specific language impairment (SLI) in users of sign language. A group of 50 children were referred to the study by teachers and speech and language therapists. Individuals who fitted pre-determined criteria for SLI were then systematically assessed. Here, we describe in detail the performance of 13 signing deaf children aged 5-14 years on normed...

PURPOSE Although mean length of utterance (MLU) is a useful benchmark in studies of children with specific language impairment (SLI), some empirical and interpretive issues are unresolved. The authors report on 2 studies examining, respectively, the concurrent validity and temporal stability of MLU equivalency between children with SLI and typically developing children. METHOD Study 1 used 12...

Future perspectives on children with language impairments are framed from what is known about children with specific language impairment (SLI). A summary of the current state of services is followed by discussion of how these children can be overlooked and misunderstood and consideration of why it is so hard for some children to acquire language when it is effortless for most children. Genetic ...

This study is concerned with characteristics of short-term memory (STM) in children with specific language impairment (SLI). The linguistic requirements of the test procedure, the characteristics of the test materials, and the development of linguistic representations were considered. Two experimental tasks were used: a verbal-repetition and a picture-pointing procedure. The tasks used auditory...

This study reports the results of an investigation of subject properties in the spontaneous speech of 14 4-year old English speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and two control groups (age and MLUm). It is shown that while the children with SLI perform much below their age-level with respect to grammatical properties of subjects (subject-verb agreement, subject case), they ...

This study examined the contribution of verbal and visual memory to performance on the Family Pictures subtest of the Children's Memory Scale. This subtest purports to assess declarative memory functioning in the visual/nonverbal domain. A total of 115 nine-year-old children participated in this study. Fifty-eight had specific language impairment (SLI), whilst the remaining 57 were typically de...

PURPOSE The present study examined the utility of 2 measures proposed as markers of specific language impairment (SLI) in identifying specific impairments in language or working memory in school-age children. METHOD A group of 400 school-age children completed a 5-min screening consisting of nonword repetition and sentence recall. A subset of low (n = 52) and average (n = 38) scorers complete...

PURPOSE In this study, the authors assessed the effects of phonotactic probability and neighborhood density on word-learning configuration by preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) and typical language development (TD). METHOD One hundred thirty-one children participated: 48 with SLI, 44 with TD matched on age and gender, and 39 with TD matched on vocabulary and gender. Referent...

It is well established that people with autism have impaired face processing, but much less is known about voice processing in autism. Four experiments were therefore carried out to assess (1) familiar voice-face and sound-object matching; (2) familiar voice recognition; (3) unfamiliar voice discrimination; and (4) vocal affect naming and vocal-facial affect matching. In Experiments 1 and 2 lan...

....................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................ 4 Table of