Examination of Creative Abilities of Preschool Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

Abstract

The present study aims to examine the relationship between developmental language deficit and children’s creative ability. For this purpose, we compared the performance of preschool children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) on general and mathematic creativity tests with that of typically developing children. The findings demonstrated that children with SLI performed almost identically on the general creativity task, compared with older preschoolers, and did generally better than children from the younger age group. However, on the mathematic creativity task, they did significantly better statistically than the younger children and worse than children from the older control groups. Thus, the results showed that creativity as a specific cognitive ability seems to develop in children with SLI in the same way as in their typically developing peers but at a slower rate. In addition, our findings demonstrate some degree of dissociation between the cognitive and linguistic abilities of children with SLI.