An emergent account of language impairments in children with SLI: implications for assessment and intervention

While current theoretical accounts of language impairments in children with specific language impairment (SLI) provide clear direction with regard to intervention goal setting, these same accounts say little with regard to the intervention process. Current developments in connectionist modeling and the extension of principles of dynamical systems theory to cognitive and language development have resulted in a new theory of language development known as emergentism. In contrast to traditional formal linguistic accounts, the emergentist view holds that language is a dynamic evolving system that can be represented as a distribution of probabilistic information. Language acquisition, from this perspective, emerges from the child's simultaneous integration of multiple acoustic, linguistic, social and communicative cues within the context of the communicative interaction. An alternative account of SLI grounded within this emergentist view is presented, and preliminary implications are explored with respect to assessment and intervention.