UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14 (2002)
Investigating the impact of prosodic
complexity on the speech of children with Specific Language Impairment
CHLOE MARSHALL, SUSAN EBBELS, JOHN HARRIS & HEATHER VAN DER LELY
Children
with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have difficulty with, amongst other
things, non-word repetition tasks. This paper presents preliminary research
into the nature of the phonological deficit in SLI. We report results from four
SLI children tested on a new set of non-words which, unlike previous sets,
takes metrical and syllabic complexity into account. Most errors occur in
non-words with adjoined syllables. The implications of this finding for the
nature of the phonological deficit in SLI, and its possible impact on syntactic
and morphological abilities, are discussed.
[PDF file]