Recognition of gated words by children with specific language impairment: An examination of lexical mapping

In this study we examined the lexical mapping stage of auditory word recogn ition in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twenty-one child ren with SLI, 21 children matched For chronological age (CM), and 21 vocabu lary-matched (VM) children participated in a forward gating task in which t hey listened to successive temporal chunks of Familiar monosyllabic nouns. After each gate, children guessed the identity of the word and provided a c onfidence rating of their word guess. Results revealed that the children wi th SLI performed comparably to the CM and VM children on all seven dependen t measures related to lexical mapping. The Findings were interpreted to sug gest that children with SLI and their normally developing peers demonstrate a comparable lexical mapping phase (i.e., acoustic-phonetic analysis) of a uditory word recognition.