Types of repairs used by normally developing and language-impaired preschool children in response to clarification...

Competent communicators learn to regulate and modify speech within a conversational dyad. Speech modifications may entail selecting appropriate words, reducing the complexity of utterances, or elaborating for clarification [Leonard Top. Lang. Disord. 4:28-37 (1983)]. This study was designed to examine how 4- to 5 1/2-year-old language-impaired children respond to clarification requests; how their repairs differ from two groups of matched controls; and how type of request affects the repair. Fifteen boys served as subjects, five with language impairments and 10 controls with normal language, half matched for age and cognition and half matched for verbal competence. Three types of requests were used: requests for confirmation, neutral requests, and requests for specific constituent repetition. All three groups of children in this study overwhelmingly used revisions to repair their original utterances. The repair strategies used by the language-impaired children did not differ from the controls. The clinical implications of the findings are discussed.