Specific language impairment in children: research findings and their therapeutic implications

This paper reports the findings from a research project investigating a subgroup of specifically language-impaired (SLI) children. The subgroup of SLI children consists of those characterised by persisting grammatical deficits in comprehension and expression of language. The paper summarises the findings in order to highlight the therapeutic implications from the investigations. The main focus of the investigations was to characterise the SLI children's grammatical knowledge of sentence comprehension, specifically their ability to learn the semantic and syntactic properties of verbs. In addition, an investigation of verbal short-term memory (STM) was carried out, and an analysis was undertaken of the expressive morpho-grammatical characteristics of the children. The investigations revealed that the SLI children did not differ in their STM abilities from children carefully matched on language abilities. Thus, the data do not provide support for therapy directed at increasing auditory memory with an aim of improving expression or comprehension of sentences. It is hypothesised that the SLI children have a deficit in syntactic representations and are unable to specify the structural relationships between constituents in syntax. The implications of the study are that this subgroup of SLI children may be unable to use syntactic cues to help learn semantic properties of verbs, but semantic cues may facilitate learning the syntactic properties of verbs.