HIERARCHICAL PLANNING ABILITIES IN CHILDREN WITH SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENTS

The present study examined Cromer's (1983) claim that children with la nguage impairments have a hierarchical planning deficit that affects l anguage as well as performance on complex construction tasks. Subjects were 30 boys (ages 5-7 years), 15 with specific language impairments (SLI) and 15 with normally developing language. Children were asked to build four hierarchical structures a block construction, a puzzle con struction, a simple straw construction, and a complex straw constructi on. Children who failed to complete the complex straw construction wer e taught how to construct the model using a sequential strategy. The t wo groups tended to perform comparably on the block and complex straw construction, the easiest and hardest of the four constructions. The t wo groups performed least comparably on the puzzle, simple straw const ruction, and the training task. On the basis of these findings and rec ent work by Greenfield (1991), we concluded that it is time to reject the notion that a central hierarchical planning mechanism underlies la nguage and non-language structures that contain hierarchical component s. The possible exception is early in development before language and manual actions become more autonomous and modular in nature.