What we can learn from naming errors of children with language impairment at preschool age

ABSTRACT

Naming is a complex, multi-level process. It is composed of distinct semantic and phonological levels. Children with naming deficits produce different error types when failing to retrieve the target word. This study explored the error characteristics of children with language impairment compared to those with typical language development. 46 preschool children were tested on a naming test: 16 with language impairment and a naming deficit and 30 with typical language development. The analysis compared types of error in both groups. In a group level, children with language impairment produced different error patterns compared to the control group. Based on naming error analysis and performance on other language tests, two case studies of contrasting profiles suggest different sources for lexical retrieval difficulties in children. The findings reveal differences between the two groups in naming scores and naming errors, and support a qualitative impairment in early development of children with naming deficits. The differing profiles of naming deficits emphasise the importance of including error analysis in the diagnosis.

KEYWORDS:

• Language impairment
• lexical retrieval
• naming errors

Acknowledgements

We thank Revital Barkai and Gil Levin for their help in collecting the data of the children with TLD. We thank Natalia Meir for her comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ Here and throughout the paper, translations of the error examples will be given only when the error forms an existing word, to illustrate the semantic relation between the target word and the error. When the error is a phonological error that forms a nonword, only a transcription of the phonotactic nonword is given, without translation.

² These responses are also called ‘blocking responses’ (Dockrell et al., 2001).