Comprehension of inferential meaning in language-impaired and language normal children

Three groups of language-normal (LN) 6, 8 and 16/17 year olds, and a group of language-impaired (LI) children were given a task answering questions ab out pictures that involved inferential meaning. A developmental progression in the types of responses given is seen, with the LI children performing l ike the youngest LN children. A similar progression is seen in the ability to justify the answers given to inferential questions with the young adult group giving the fewest justifications that were problematical in some way. Larger numbers of problematical justifications in the LI group can be rela ted to some extent to non-pragmatic aspects of their impairment, but overal l this group also gave more pragmatically irrelevant responses when asked t o justify answers given. It was not possible to identify any major differen ces between subgroups of children within the LI group, identified as pragma tically impaired (PI) and non pragmatically impaired (NPI), in terms of eit her answers given to inferential questions or in terms of problematical jus tifications for these answers. Possible reasons for these findings are disc ussed.