The role of new and old information in the verbal expression of language-disordered children

The present study used an experimental method to investigate the marking of new and old information in the verbal expression of language-disordered children beyond the one-word stage. The results showed that language-disordered children selectively mark new information in verbal communication, just as normal children do. Language-disordered and normal children, furthermore, manifest the same developmental sequence of strategies for deemphasizing old information--children at an MLU level of 3 tend to omit it, whereas children at an MLU level of 5 tend to pronominalize it. Although both normal and language-disordered children demonstrated the same verbal strategies, a subgroup of language-disordered subjects (over half) pronominalized old information more frequently than normal subjects. These language-disordered subjects demonstrated a proportionately different combination of language features than would be expected at their MLU level.