A comparison of verbal communicative skills of language impaired and normal speaking children

This investigation compared the speech act usage of language impaired and normal speaking children. Twenty language impaired subjects (LI) in stages III and IV constituted the experimental group. One control group consisted of 20 normal speaking younger children (NSY) equated with the language impaired subjects by MLU. The other control group consisted of 20 older normal speaking children (NSO) equated with the experimental group by chronological age. Two observers independently identified ten speech acts used by the subjects during free play sessions with a peer. The results indicated that the same speech acts were used in similar proportions by all three groups. The NSO used more utterances than the LI and NSY subjects. The NSO used describing and acknowledging speech acts more than the LI or NSY. Answering was used more frequently by the LI than the NSO. Requesting an action was used more frequently by the NSY than the NSO. The results suggest that language impaired subjects are able to use a variety of speech acts but that they appear to be delayed in their pragmatic development. Clinical implications of the data are presented.