Conversational responsiveness in specific language impairment: Evidence ofdisproportionate pragmatic difficulties in a subset of children

Eighteen children with specific language impairment (SLI), from 6 to 8 year s of age, were compared with 9 control children matched on age and nonverba l ability (CA controls) and with 9 younger control children of comparable l anguage level (LA controls). Half of the SLI group were rated on a reacher checklist as having pragmatic difficulties: these were referred to as the p ragmatic language impairment (PLI) group; the remainder were the typical (S LI-T) group. Children's responses to adult soliciting utterances were compa red. All children usually responded to conversational solicitations, but ch ildren in the PLI group were more likely than control children to give no r esponse, and they also made very little use of nonverbal responses, such as nodding. Nonverbal responding was closely related to the quality of childr en's responses. Children who failed to use nonverbal responses also had a r elatively high level of pragmatically inappropriate responses that were not readily accounted for in terms of limited grammar or vocabulary. This stud y lends support to the notion that there is a subset of the language-impair ed population who have broader communicative impairments, extending beyond basic difficulties in mastering language form, reflecting difficulty in res ponding to and expressing communicative intents. The analytic methods devel oped for this project have promise for the study of pragmatic difficulties in other clinical groups.