Phonological Breakdowns in Children with Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have defici ts in morphosyntactic, lexical, and pragmatic development that limit their communicative success (Fey, Warr-Leeper, Webber, & Disher, 1988). In addition, many children with SLI have concomitant speech disorders (Shriberg, Tomblin, & McSweeny, 1999) that further compound their communication difficulties. The phonological characteristics of children with SLI have been reported in many studies (see Leonard, 1998 for a review). Early studies found that children with SLI have errors in their production of individual consonants and vowels (Farwell, 1972; Leonard, 1973). More recent inquiries report homonymy in the productions of children with SLI (Leonard, Camarata, Schwartz, Chapman, & Messick, 1985), difficulty with certain feature contrasts such as voicing (Catts & Jenson, 1983), and unusual error patterns (Fey, 1985; Leonard & Brown, 1984; Leonard, 1985). Children with SLI also have phonological errors resulting from contextual influences within and between words (Chiat, 1989; Grunwell, 1992). For example, Leonard's (1982) description of the phonological characteristics of children with SLI revealed that almost a quarter of errors in stop consonants were attributable to harmony. In addition, Leonard (1982) reported that children with SLI experienced errors due to syllable reduplication approximately 15% of the time, and syllable reductions almost 40% of the time, during extended conversations.