Sub-groups of school-age language impaired children

Abstract

Teachers and therapists are well aware that language-impaired children, particularly as they get older, present with a variety of linguistic difficulties. After a brief review of earlier typological studies, this paper addresses the issue of identifying sub-groups of school-age language- impaired children, using a language production process model. The analysis involves, in addition to measures of syntactic ability, features of the children's performance such as mazes, and the full range of 'errors' exhibited in their output. Results indicate that variation among the children on the measures applied can be utilized to construct profiles which identify distinct sub-groups in terms of their language production performance.

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