BACKGROUND Peer relations is a vulnerable area of functioning in children with specific language impairment (SLI), but little is known about the developmental trajectories of individuals. METHODS Peer problems were investigated over a 9-year period (from 7 to 16 years of age) in 171 children with a history of SLI. Discrete factor growth modelling was used to chart developmental trajectories. ...

PURPOSE In this study, the authors assessed the hypothesis of a limitation in attentional allocation capacity as underlying poor sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI). METHOD Fifteen children with SLI, 15 age-matched controls, and 15 grammar-matched controls participated in the study. Sixty sentences were presented in isolation, and 60 sentences were prese...

Children's productions of the affix -ed in past tense and past participle contexts (e.g., the boy kicked the ball vs. the ball was kicked) were examined in spontaneous conversations and elicited productions. The performances of 7 children with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared with those of 2 control groups of typically developing children (age matches, MLU matches). Children wit...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to measure the effect of time to response in a fast-mapping word learning task for children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typically developing language skills (TD). Manipulating time to response allows us to examine decay of the memory trace, the use of vocal rehearsal, and their effects on word learning. METHOD Participants in...

It has been proposed that specific language impairment (SLI) is caused by an impairment of auditory processing, but it is unclear whether this problem affects temporal processing, frequency discrimination (FD), or both. Furthermore, there are few longitudinal studies in this area, making it hard to establish whether any deficit represents a developmental lag or a more permanent deficit. To addr...

PURPOSE To verify the average time of silent pauses in narratives and the influence of story's complexity in the occurrence of these pauses in narratives of children with typical language development and children with specific language impairment (SLI), and further to compare these aspects between groups. METHODS Sixty children aged between seven to ten years took part in this research, being...

Seventy-seven children between the ages of 6 and 10 years, with severe mixed receptive-expressive specific language impairment (SLI), participated in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of Fast ForWord (FFW; Scientific Learning Corporation, 1997, 2001). FFW is a computer-based intervention for treating SLI using acoustically enhanced speech stimuli. These stimuli are modified to exaggerate thei...

BACKGROUND Previous research suggests that speakers are especially likely to produce manual communicative gestures when they have relative ease in thinking about the spatial elements of what they are describing, paired with relative difficulty organizing those elements into appropriate spoken language. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit poor expressive language abilities t...

Typically developing (TD) preschoolers and age-matched preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) received event-related potentials (ERPs) to four monosyllabic speech sounds prior to treatment and, in the SLI group, after 6 months of grammatical treatment. Before treatment, the TD group processed speech sounds faster than the SLI group. The SLI group increased the speed of their speec...

Handedness and language skills were assessed in 196 same-sex twin pairs (101 MZ and 95 DZ), who were selected from an epidemiological study of twins, so that children with risk of language impairment were over-represented. When assessed at 6 years of age, 83 children met criteria for specific language impairment (SLI), 32 had general developmental (GD) delay, and the remaining 277 were typicall...