Children with specific language impairment present a challenge to researchers and clinicians interested in the causes, diagnosis, treatment, prognosis and prevention of this disorder. The language and learning difficulties associated with this population are not well understood-- particularly in the later stages of development, when basic grammar and vocabulary have been acquired but subtle deficits in oral and written language remain. Recently investigators have proposed that information processing deficits may be related to specific language impairment and that these deficits may extend into other cognitive processing domains as well. A broad range of linguistic deficits has also been identified in LI children, although not all children are equally impaired. However, it is not clear how processing limitations are related to these language deficits. The major purpose of this research is to evaluate hypotheses that (1) LI children are impaired in their grammatical knowledge and (2) LI children are limited in their information processing capacities (e.g. short-term memory, selective attention, retrieval mechanisms). Two-related lines of research are proposed: (1)Real-time grammatical processing studies of receptive language, using techniques that can capture the temporal aspects of morphosyntactic processing (i.e. when specific parsing decisions are made, and how those decisions are affected by different kinds of contextual information). (2)Confrontation grammar and discourse studies of the grammatical aspects of expressive language across a carefully structured series of repetition, repair and discourse contexts to determine the """"""""functional range"""""""" of linguistic structures available to the child and how processing factors interact with performance. In sum, tasks will be employed to study LI and LN children's abilities to access and deploy linguistic knowledge. The results of these findings can then be used to evaluate hypotheses that LI children suffer from underdeveloped grammatical knowledge and/or information processing deficits.
| Trauner, D; Wulfeck, B; Tallal, P et al. (2000) Neurological and MRI profiles of children with developmental language impairment. Dev Med Child Neurol 42:470-5 |
| Marchman, V A; Wulfeck, B; Weismer, S E (1999) Morphological productivity in children with normal language and SLI: a study of the English past tense. J Speech Lang Hear Res 42:206-19 |
| Wulfeck, B B (1993) A reaction time study of grammaticality judgments in children. J Speech Hear Res 36:1208-15 |
| Wulfeck, B B; Trauner, D A; Tallal, P A (1991) Neurologic, cognitive, and linguistic features of infants after early stroke. Pediatr Neurol 7:266-9 |
