A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LANGUAGE ABILITIES IN NORMAL CHILDREN AND THOSE WITH SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT IN THE JAPANESE LANGUAGE : A PRELIMINARY STUDY

概要

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The purpose of this study is to compare the language abilities of normal children and those with specific language impairment (SLI) and to identify the core deficits of SLI manifested in Japanese. The participants were 5 children with SLI and 5 controls aged from 6 to 9. The narrative elicited with four-framed cartoon and a picture was analyzed in terms of the total number of meaningful units, the MLU, the number of basic and related words, and syntactical structures. The phonological processing abilities were assessed on nonword repetition and two phonological awareness tasks. No difference was found between the two groups in the total number of meaningful units nor in the MLU. The SLI participants differed from the controls in the following : They (1) used fewer subordinate conjunctions, (2) produced fewer basic and related words, (3) made more errors in the use of the case particles regarding the causative structure with the three arguments, and (4) had poorer phonological processing abilities and auditory short-term memory than the controls.