Background: In many languages a weakness in non-word repetition serves as a useful clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in children. However, recent work in Italian has shown that the repetition of real words may also have clinical utility. For young typically developing Italian children, real word repetition is more predictive of…

Background: Children with language impairment often exhibit significant difficulty in the use of grammatical morphology. Although English-speaking children with language impairment have special difficulties with verb morphology, noun morphology can also be problematic in languages of a different typology. Aims: Hungarian is an agglutinating…

Background: Many school-age children with specific language impairment produce sentences that appear to conform to the adult grammar. It may be premature to conclude from this, however, that their language formulation ability is age appropriate. Aims: To determine whether a more subtle measure of language use, speech disruptions during sentence…

Background: Surprizingly little is known about the use of modal auxiliaries by children with specific language impairment (SLI). These forms fall within the category of grammatical morphology, an area of morphosyntax that is purportedly very weak in children with SLI. Aims: Three studies were conducted to examine the use of modal auxiliaries by…

Two studies compared phonological characteristics of American and Italian preschool-age children with specific language impairments (SLI) with younger controls matched for mean length of utterance and consonant inventory size. In Italian and English, children with SLI had more difficulty in the use of non-final weak syllables. (Contains…

Background: The discovery of clinical markers for specific language impairment (SLI) in children can assist in the accurate identification of children with this disorder, and in a description of the disorder's phenotype for genetic study. One challenge to this type of research is the fact that languages vary in the most salient symptoms of SLI.…

A study of J. Locke's theory of specific language impairment (SLI) found that children (n=10) with SLI who were limited to single-word utterances showed deficits in their lexical comprehension, supporting Locke's proposal. A second study found that children with SLI who had reached the grammatical stage of development showed age-appropriate…