EXPRESSIONS OF PAST TIME BY NORMAL AND LANGUAGE-IMPAIRED CHILDREN

This study investigated possible developmental asynchrony in children with specific language impairment (SLI). This was accomplished by comp aring the development of temporal expressions of past reference in two linguistic domains. Verb tense and temporal adverbs served as represe ntatives of the morphological and lexical domains. A cross-sectional d esign was used with four groups of subjects (N = 48) from 3 to 5 years old. Three groups had normal language and one group had impaired lang uage. Results indicated that the performances of SLI children were sim ilar to those of their 3-year-old language peers on the verb tasks and similar to the 4-year-olds on the adverb tasks. Such differential del ays provide direct experimental evidence for asynchronous language dev elopment in SLI children.