Sentence comprehension strategies in specifically language impaired children.

This study investigated sentence comprehension and the use of sentence comprehension strategies by specifically language impaired children. Eleven specifically language impaired (SLI) children (aged 4,0 to 6,0), chosen according to strict criteria, were compared with eleven children matched on chronological age and eleven language controls matched on the receptive scores from the Reynell Developmental Language Scale and the British Picture Vocabulary Scale. Subjects acted out active and passive voice sentences that had either a positive or negative semantic bias or were unbiased semantically. the SLI children performed at a signficantly lower level than both the age and language control subjects. They relied more heavily on semantic cues than the language control children and all eleven consistently applied a ‘probable event strategy’. Word order responses that took the first noun to be the actor were used with equal frequency by SLI children and language controls. However, these responses were used less ...