Semantic and inferencing abilities in children with communication disorders

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Semantic and inferencing abilities are crucial for effective communication.
• These higher-order language skills are not fully understood in children with communication difficulties.
• Investigating these skills can inform targeted interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess semantic and inferencing skills in children with specific language impairment and primary pragmatic difficulties.
• To compare the performance of these clinical groups with typically developing peers.
• To utilize newly designed tasks to evaluate these cognitive-linguistic abilities.

Main Methods:

• Compared 25 children (11 years) with specific language impairment and 22 children (11 years) with primary pragmatic difficulties.
• Included three control groups of typically developing children (11, 9, and 7 years).
• Administered novel tasks designed to measure semantic and inferencing abilities.

Main Results:

• Children with specific language impairment performed significantly worse on semantic tasks than 9- and 11-year-old peers.
• Children with pragmatic difficulties scored significantly lower than all typically developing groups on semantic tasks.
• Both clinical groups performed below 11-year-old peers on inferencing tasks, but not below younger peers, suggesting inferencing aligns with language ability.

Conclusions:

• Newly developed tasks revealed significant challenges in semantic and inferencing abilities for children with communication impairments.
• Semantic abilities were more affected in children with pragmatic difficulties compared to those with specific language impairment.
• Performance differences suggest that the nature of communication difficulty influences the specific cognitive-linguistic skills impacted.