The Role of Phonotactic Frequency in Sentence Repetition by Children With Specific Language Impairment

摘要

PurposeRecent work suggests that specific language impairment (SLI) results from a primary deficit in phonological processing. This deficit is most striking in nonword repetition tasks, where semantic and syntactic demands are eliminated. Children with SLI repeat nonwords less accurately than do their unimpaired peers, which may reflect difficulty extracting phonological regularities from their lexicons. However, recent evidence suggests that having children with SLI respond to meaningless syllables such as nonwords underestimates their language abilities. Therefore, phonological processing was measured by having children repeat meaningful sentences containing target words differing in phonotactic pattern frequency (PPF).