Object and action naming in children with specific language impairment

Area of Science:

• Child Language Acquisition
• Neurodevelopmental Disorders
• Speech and Language Pathology

Background:

• Specific Language Impairment (SLI) affects language development in children.
• Understanding naming abilities (object and action) is crucial for assessing language skills.
• The noun-verb performance gap in children with SLI requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine accuracy, latency, and errors in noun and verb naming in children with and without SLI.
• To determine if children with SLI exhibit a larger noun-verb performance gap compared to peers.
• To analyze naming error types in relation to semantic representation.

Main Methods:

• A computerized confrontation naming task was used.
• Participants included children with SLI and two control groups: age-matched (AM) and vocabulary-matched (VM) peers.
• 120 matched object and action pictures were presented for naming.

Main Results:

• Children with SLI and VM peers had comparable naming accuracy and latency, both slower and less accurate than AM peers.
• Object naming was more accurate than action naming in SLI and VM groups, with similar noun-verb gaps.
• The SLI group made fewer taxonomic errors and more omission errors for objects, and fewer misperception errors for actions compared to AM peers.

Conclusions:

• Naming abilities in children with SLI are aligned with their vocabulary level, not chronological age.
• Naming errors suggest immature semantic representations in children with SLI.
• Action naming is harder than object naming, but the noun-verb gap in SLI is appropriate for their vocabulary level.