Anita Rom

The use of six nonverbal pragmatic behaviors was investigated for three groups of subjects. The experimental group (LI) consisted of 20 language-impaired children who were in stages III and IV of linguistic development. One control group (NSY) consisted of 20 normal-speaking children equated with the experimental group on the basis of mean length of utterance. Another control group (NSO) consisted of 20 normal-speaking children equated with the experimental group by chronologic age. The NSY were younger, whereas the NSO were of the same age as the LI. Two individuals observed each child and a peer playing with toys and recorded the presence of the six behaviors for each subject. The LI and the NSY and the NSO did not differ significantly for five behaviors. Play was the only behavior that distinguished the groups. The clinical implications of the results are discussed.

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.

ABSTRACTChildren's production of case-marked pronouns in Hebrew was studied with respect to possessive marking, direct-object marking, and ‘on’- locative marking. In each of these three instances the preposition appears in a bound form with a suffixal pronominal. One hundred and five children between 2;0 and 5:5 were tested in a game-like procedure designed to elicit each of the three prepositions with 1st, 2nd and 3rd personal pronouns. Results indicate that general cross-linguistic principles are operating in the acquisition process, while language specific morphophonological complexity affects relative order of acquisition. A developmental sequence may be seen in the five response patterns identified.

Preliminary data from seven Hebrew-speaking specifically language-impaired children (aged 4;4 to 5;3) were examined to evaluate alternative explanations of cross-linguistic differences among children with specific language impairment. The Hebrew-speaking specifically language-impaired children were found to make considerably greater use of grammatical morphemes than seven English-speaking specifically language-impaired children (aged 3;6 to 6;9) showing comparable mean utterance length measured in words. However, the Hebrew-speaking children with specific language impairment were not without limitations in morphology; relative to seven younger, normally developing Hebrew-speaking children (aged 2;4 to 3;3) matched for mean utterance length measured in morphemes, these children exhibited deficiencies with certain grammatical morphemes. The data suggest that the rich morphology of Hebrew gives Hebrew-speaking specifically language-impaired children an advantage over their English-speaking counterparts. However, even within Hebrew, specifically language-impaired children may have special difficulty with grammatical morphemes of low perceptual salience.