ERROR ANALYSIS OF PRONOUNS BY NORMAL AND LANGUAGE-IMPAIRED CHILDREN

Recent research has located extraordinary weakness in specifically lan guage-impaired (SLI) children's development other than grammatical mor phemes. A problem with pronoun case marking was reported to be more pr evalent in SLI children than in normally developing children matched b y mean length of utterance. However, results from the present study do not support that finding. Spontaneous utterances from 3 conversationa l contexts were generated by 3 groups of normal and SLI children and w ere analyzed for accuracy of pronoun usage. Third person singular pron ouns were judged according to case, gender, number, person and cohesio n based on their linguistic and nonlinguistic contexts. Results indica ted that SLI children exhibited more total errors than their chronolog ical peers, but not more than their language level peers. An analysis of error types indicated a similar pattern in pronoun case marking.