RHYMING AND RELATED SKILLS IN CHILDREN WITH SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT

This paper presents two studies which investigated rhyme-related abili ties in children with specific language impairment. The first study, a preliminary exploratory investigation, looked at the performance of f our specifically language impaired (SLI) children on tasks involving t he production of poetry, the reproduction of nursery rhymes, and the p roduction of rhyming and alliterative words. The second study investig ated the phonological awareness skills of 44 SLI children in compariso n with age-matched and language-matched control groups. Results of bot h studies indicated that the SLI children experienced difficulty with rhyme and related tasks, both at an epilinguistic and at a more consci ous metalinguistic level. The SLI children in the second study not onl y performed significantly worse than the age-matched control group, bu t also than the younger language-matched control group. It is suggeste d that the SLI children had difficulty in making the shift from conten t to form: a shift which is believed to be necessary for metalinguisti c awareness. This relative insensitivity to the sound properties of la nguage places language-impaired children at risk of reading and spelli ng difficulty. Moreover, the difficulties experienced by the SLI group with the metalinguistic tasks may also disadvantage them further in t he development of more complex higher-level learning.