Another look at semantic relational categories and language impairment

Earlier comparative studies of language-impaired and normal children involved semantic-relational analyses of broad categories (e.g., action, locative action, and so on) in which utterance types were not differentiated. In this study, locative action utterances were differentiated by the types of locative words used singly and in combination. The types of utterances used by a language-impaired child were tracked between 1 year 6 months and 3 years and compared with those of three age- and MLU-matched normal children. The results suggested that differences in the semantic properties of language-impaired and normal children's utterances may go undetected unless a fine-grained analysis is performed on the types of expressions used within a global relational category. The potential value of extending semantic-relational analyses by exploring word use in syntactic contexts is addressed.