Phonological deficits in French speaking children with SLI

This study investigated the phonological disorders of French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in production.

The main goal was to confirm whether children with SLI have limitations in phonological ability as compared with normally developing children matched by mean length of utterance (MLU) and phonemic inventory size. A number of researchers have obtained findings pointing in this direction, but the conclusions have never been tested on French-speaking children. The second goal was to find out whether characteristic features of the French language are reflected in the nature of the children's phonological disorder.

The spontaneous language of 16 children with SLI and 16 control children matched on MLU and phonemic inventory size (normal language development group) were analysed using different measures bearing on utterances, words, syllables and phonemes. In both SLI and NLD groups, the children were distributed into two different subgroups based on their MLU, with controlled phonemic inventory size.

The results supported a specific limitation in the phonological abilities of French children with SLI, as has already been demonstrated for English, Hebrew, Italian and Spanish-Catalan. However, two unexpected results were also obtained. First, a significant difference between children with SLI and control children could only be found for older children (MLU>3), not for younger children with MLU<3. This was true for all measures.

This finding highlights the importance of having a developmental perspective and needs to be confirmed through a longitudinal study. Second, deficits were much more significant at the phoneme level than at the syllable level. This may be explained by the fact that the pronunciation of syllables in French is very homogenous, making them easier to segment.