Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

R. INGHAM
2. Subjects and hypotheses
From a database containing transcriptions from 42 children diagnosed
clinically as having a specific language impairment, two groups of SLI
subjects were identified, one with chronological age-appropriate receptive
lexical knowledge, as measured by BPVS age-equivalent scores within 4
months of the child’s chronological age at testing, the other with a deficit of
two years or more in BPVS scores. The first group will be referred to as the
‘no lexical deficit’ (-LD) group and the second as the ‘lexical deficit’ (+LD)
group. There were thus four groups: 10 children with SLI [-LD], that is who
had chronological age-equivalent BPVS scores, 10 language-normal (LN)
children matched for BPVS with the children with SLI child by child. There
were also 10 children with SLI [+LD] who obtained a BPVS score of 2 years
or more below their CA, and 10 LN children matched with them child-bychild
for BPVS. Group means for age, BPVS score and MLU (morphemes)
are given below:
Table 1: Subject group means
SLI
SLI
[-LD]
[+LD]
CA BPVS MLU CA BPVS MLU
a.e. (M) a.e. (M)
6;6 6;7 4.32 7;2 4;4 3.90
LN MATCHES
LN MATCHES
OF SLI [-LD]
OF SLI [+LD]
CA BPVS MLU CA BPVS MLU
a.e. (M) a.e. (M)
5;9 6;7 N/A 4;9 4;4 N/A
The NLD group was slightly younger than the LD group (with an average CA
of 6;2 as compared with the LD groups CA of 7;1) but had a higher MLU
(4.32 as compared with 3.90). The LD group, not surprisingly, also had an
expressive lexical deficit as measured by Renfrew age-equivalent scores,
which was found to average a full 2 years across the group. We are therefore
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