title: Early verb-related vulnerability among children with specific language impairment.
abstract: The purpose of this study was to characterize the nature of early grammatical development among very young children with specific language impairment (SLI). Grammatical development was examined for two subtypes: (a) children with expressive language impairments only (SLI-E) and (b) children with both receptive and expressive language impairments (SLI-RE). In particular, characteristics of noun-phrase (NP) and verb-phrase (VP) elaboration were examined longitudinally to determine whether structures associated with NP and VP emerged together following a typical developmental progression. Group analyses did not reveal any differences between the subtypes on the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough, 1990). However, specific weakness in VP elaboration was revealed on the IPSyn as well as in more extensive productivity analyses. The contribution of these findings to a developmentally sensitive grammatical description of SLI for very young children is discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Science, Arizona State University, Tempe 85287-1908, USA. hadley@asu.edu
authors.forename: P A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Hadley
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D008297:Male; D013997:Time Factors