The grammatical production in the narrative discourse of pupils with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

Abstract

The aim of this research was to determine and compare the performance in the syntactic production and the ungrammaticality among pupìls with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and two groups of pupils with typical language development. The sample was composed of a total of 84 children divided into three groups. A SLI group with 34 children, between 5.98 and 11.53 years old; a group of chronological control 33 children, between 5.73 and 10.74 years old; and a group of linguistic control with 17 children, between 4.64 and 5.60 years. The procedure used for the elicitation of stories was to retell the story Frog, where are you? After a literal transcription and segmented the corpus into sentences, we proceeded to determine those that constitute ungrammatical sentences and those that have grammatical errors. The results showed that there was no difference among the three groups in the production of simple sentences. However, in the production of complex syntax, there were no significant differences between the linguistic control and SLI, but there was a big difference between these two groups and the chronological control group. In relation to the production of ungrammatical sentences and grammatical errors, it was shown a similar behavior between SLI and linguistic control groups, although they were worse than the chronological controls. The conclusions indicate that the pupils with TEL present a very significant delay in their morphosyntax, with serious limitations in the syntactic processing abilities.