Word association analysis of children with disabilities

Purpose: This study aimed to compare the types of response words for stimuli in children with language impairment and normal children through the word association task.Methods: For this study, 60 children with language impairment aged 9-11 years old and 60 normal children of the same language age as them were selected. The list of stimulus words for the word association task consisted of 25 nouns, 6 verbs and 6 adjectives.Results: The research results were as follows. First, it was found that the appearance rate of association words in the form and syntax among the intra-linguistic association was higher in the children with language impairment than in the normal children, and the appearance rate of association words in the meaning and pragmatics was lower than that of the normal children. Second, in children with language impairment, the appearance rate of verb response words was high in the noun stimulus words, and the noun response words appeared high in the verb and adjective stimulus words.Conclusions: In conclusion, compared to the normal children, the form and syntax-oriented syntagmatic associative responses were higher than the semantic-oriented paradigmatic associative responses, indicating that the stimulus and response words were used side by side in sentences.