Prosodic abilities in children with specific language impairment

The purpose of this study was to compare the receptive and expressive prosodic abilities of specifically language-impaired children to those of a matched group of control normal-language children. Each subject group consisted of ten 4-year-olds, ten 5-year-olds and ten 6-year-olds. Subjects were administered two instruments which were designed for this purpose: the prosody imitation task and the emotion identification task. In the prosody imitation task subjects were required to imitate ten sentences with different linguistic and affective intonation contours. The emotion identification task required subjects to identify recordings of emotionally intoned sentences. Language-impaired children performed significantly less accurately on the imitation task but did not differ from normal-language children on the emotion identification task. Age was found to be a highly significant factor. On both tasks children performed better with increasing age. Results are discussed in reference to the developmental relationship between the child's learning of language and prosodic cues.