What can errors tell us about specific language impairment deficits? Semantic and morphological cuing in a sentence completion task

Abstract

The lexical retrieval ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical language development was compared. Fifty Hebrew-speaking children participated: 15 school-age with SLI, 20 typically developing, matched on age to the SLI group and 15 younger, typically developing matched on naming performance to the SLI group. Participants were tested in a sentence completion task with semantic cuing and with morphological cuing. SLI children performed poorer than the chronological-age group and similarly to the naming-matched group. Error patterns showed a qualitative difference between the SLI and naming-matched groups. The results suggest that lexical retrieval of children with SLI is delayed and qualitatively different from that of typically developing children.

• Derivation
• lexical-retrieval
• morphological-cueing
• semantic-cueing
• sentence-completion
• SLI

Acknowledgements

We thank Naama Friedmann for her help in developing the sentence completion task. We thank Barbara Z. Pearson, Irit Meir, Einat Shetreet and Tamar Dgani for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We thank Gil Levin and Revital Barkai for their help in collecting the data.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹The current study tested a specific group of children that confirm the diagnosis of both SLI and WFDs as described in the Method section. The terms SLI or children with WFDs are used along the paper depending on the terms that are used in the original study discussed.

²The English system is what morphologists refer to as linear.

³The notation of “X” in meXaXeX intend to highlight the morphological modification of the root (in this case “s.r.k.”) and the role of the template (in lowercase).

⁴The facilitating role of morphology is relatively strong for Semitic languages (i.e. Hebrew) (Ravid & Malenky, 2001).

⁵The hesitations were counted as hesitation errors when the target word was produced. When an additional error was produced, it counted separately. See an example in the procedure and error analysis section.