Sentence processing strategies in children with expressive and expressive-receptive specific language impairments

The purpose of this study was to investigate the sentence comprehension str ategies used by children with expressive and expressive-receptive specific language impairments (SLI) within a language processing framework. Fourteen children with SLI (ages 6;10-7;11) meeting strict selection criteria were compared to seven age-matched and seven younger normal controls. Children w ere asked to determine the agent in sentences composed of two nouns and a v erb (NVN, NNV, VNN) with animacy of the noun as a second factor. Results of group comparisons revealed that children with E-SLI and ER-SLI differed fr om each other in the comprehension strategies they employed as well. as dif fering from both age-matched and younger normal language control groups. Ch ildren with E-SLI relied exclusively on a first noun as agent strategy acro ss all conditions, whereas children with ER-SLI used animacy cues when avai lable. Additionally, maximum likelihood estimates were calculated to invest igate individual patterns of performance under different cue conditions. Re sults revealed a significant correlation between severity of receptive lang uage abilities and the type of strategy used, with better receptive languag e skills being highly correlated with children's use of word order cues.