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It has been well documented that children with language impairment (LI) experience difficulties on narrative tasks. Despite our knowledge of language differences in subgroups of children with LI, narrative studies often include a heterogeneous group of children. The purpose of this project was to compare narrative abilities in school-aged children with combined receptive and expressive language impairments (RE-LI) and children with expressive language impairments only (E-LI) Participants were matched for age, nonverbal cognition, and maternal education. Tasks included measures of narrative construction and retelling, as well as narrative comprehension. Results revealed differences between the groups on the majority of linguistic (MLU, TNW, NDW) and structural (story grammar components, propositions recalled, total utterances) measures assessed for both narrative construction and retelling tasks, as well as narrative comprehension. Although children with E-LI performed better than children with RE-LI, there was no difference between groups on grammatical accuracy of utterances produced. Findings suggest the need for differentiating subgroups of LI in future research. Funding source NIDCD - O5 R03 DC005920-03 |
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