Language-impaired children's awareness of inadequate messages

Inasmuch as past research supports the notion that language-impaired children are deficient in their performance on some metalinguistic/metacommunicative tasks, we hypothesized an expected deficiency on a language awareness task requiring judgments of message adequacy. To test our hypothesis, we chose 45 subjects, 15 specific language-impaired school-age children with 15 age-mates and 15 younger controls. Our procedure involved two lifelike stories each depicting a speaker and a listener. Within the context of each story, the speaker makes a request. However, the speaker's message is too general. Therefore, the speaker's intention is not understood. Subjects were classified as speaker-blamers or listener-blamers on the basis of responses to examiner queries. Language-impaired and the younger normally developing children were predominantly listener-blamers, whereas age-mates were speaker-blamers. The results are discussed in terms of a cognitive framework for metalinguistic/metacommunicative problem solving. In addition, clinical implications are addressed.