Longitudinal Grammaticality Judgments of Tense Marking in Complex Questions in Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment, Ages 5-18 Years.
Mabel L Rice, Kathleen Kelsey Earnest, Lesa Hoffman
PMID 37607389WHAT IT FOUND
Children with Specific Language Impairment consistently judge complex grammatical errors more poorly than typically developing peers from ages 5 to 18.
This performance gap persists despite growth in both groups, indicating that difficulty with tense marking in complex sentences is a lasting feature of the disorder.
Key findings
01SLI-affected children had lower accuracy scores than unaffected children across all four complex grammatical judgment outcomes at age 10, with a gap of approximately 0.12 on the A' scale.
02The performance difference between SLI-affected and unaffected children remained stable across the age range and was not closed by age, as there were no significant interactions between SLI status and age for most outcomes.
03After accounting for nonverbal IQ, maternal education, and sex, the average predicted accuracy in the SLI-affected group was 0.58 to 0.89 standard deviations lower than in the unaffected group.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study excluded children with nonverbal IQ below 83, so findings may not apply to those with lower cognitive abilities. Participants were monolingual speakers of General American English, limiting generalizability to dialectal variations or bilingual speakers. The examiners were not blind to the participants' SLI status, which could introduce bias in administration or scoring, although reliability checks were performed. The study is observational and does not test whether intervention can close this gap.
Declared interests
The study was supported by NIH Grants R01DC001803 and T32DC000052. No commercial conflicts of interest were reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the growth in accuracy scores for the SLI group as evidence that the disorder resolves or that the gap closes with age. The study shows that while SLI children improve, they improve at a similar rate to typically developing children, meaning the initial deficit persists throughout adolescence.