Clarification requests of normal and language-impaired children

Abstract

This report describes the verbal and non-verbal clarification requests that normal and language-impaired children emit when faced with sentences that are difficult to understand. the experiment involved 13 language-impaired children and 13 children with normally developing language who were matched by their level of receptive vocabulary. the results indicated that children with normal language and children with impaired language have the capacity to provide feedback regarding their failure to understand verbal messages. Language-impaired children generally are not as sophisticated as their normal peers and tend to emit non-specific clarification requests.

Key Words:

• language-impaired
• clarification requests