Exploring Sentence Level Difficulties in Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Murphy, Carol-Anne

Affiliations: Department of Speech and Language Therapy, University of Limerick, Ireland

Abstract: Psycholinguistic profiling of children with SLI using speech and single word processing models has yielded promising results in the assessment and remediation of phonological, semantic and literacy difficulties. Children with SLI can have problems with sentence comprehension and production. This theoretical paper outlines a rationale for applying Garrett’s (1980, 1982, 1988) model of sentence processing to understand their difficulties, with particular reference to the message (conceptual/inferential level), functional (content items-verb and its arguments) and positional levels (word forms and sentence frame) and predicts examples of the types of errors made by children with SLI at the different levels of the model with reference to relevant research literature.

Keywords: SLI, psycho linguistic profiling, sentence processing model

DOI: 10.3233/ACS-2008-16107

Journal: Journal of Clinical Speech and Language Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 55-68, 2008