Although receptive language deficits are commonly identified during the later school years and in adulthood, such deficits are less readily identified during the preschool years. This may be due to the difficulty of measuring receptive language at ages where performance expectations are low, and to the use of methods for which contextual support is high. As a result, we know little about how frequently receptive language deficits occur at younger ages or which of the component skills of receptive language might be impaired. A new paradigm is needed in order to improve identification of receptive deficits at younger ages. Infant studies have provided paradigms for dissociating components of receptive language skills that could be readily applied to understanding receptive language deficits in children with SLI. This literature has brought to light the types of cues to language structure and meaning that allow infants to translate the ongoing acoustic signal of speech into language. These include the ability to perceive speech sounds and their allowable sequences, the ability to extract words and sentence structure from the auditory signal, and the ability to attach meaning to words. The studies outlined in this grant proposal sample basic skills involved in language processing at multiple levels. All of the skills sampled are ones for which infants can demonstrate ability, and therefore represent skills that should be present by the preschool years. Behavioral methods are used to study children with specific language impairment in order to determine whether their ability to capitalize on selected cues to language structure and meaning is equivalent to that of their normally-developing peers. Extensions of these behavioral studies to adult subjects with and without language-based learning disabilities will determine whether early patterns of strengths and weaknesses persist into adulthood.
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