Conversations with children who are language impaired: asking questions

Samples of conversational language were elicited with a standardized interview protocol from 24 children, aged 2:6 to 7:8, half with specific language impairment (SLI), half with normally developing language (LN), matched for language level. Samples were analyzed to determine whether there were associations between adult questioning and children's use of ellipsis. For the SLI children, but not the LN children, increased proportions of questions were significantly correlated to increased proportions of ellipsis. This finding has implications for the use of MLU measures in clinical and research practice.