Play diversity and structural relationships in the play and language of language-impaired and language-normal...

The purpose of this study was to compare structural play-language relationships and diversity of symbolic play skills in age matched language-impaired and language-normal children. The language-impaired and language-normal children differed in their play-language correspondences when the structural metrics of mean length of utterance (MLU) and mean length of sequence (MLS) were used. Differences between the groups were also found on specific quantitative and qualitative aspects of symbolic play. Suggestions for play intervention are discussed.