Specific Language Impairment: Markers into semantic and pragmatic areas in Spanish-speaking children
Abstract
The aim of this study is to determine which semantics and pragmatics markers best discriminate Spanish-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) from children with typical language development. This study analyzes the performance of 31 Spanish-speaking children with SLI on a battery of 9 psycholinguistic tasks. The performance of the SLI children was compared with that of two subgroups of controls: aged-matched (CA) and linguistically matched (CL).
The data show that the SLI group performed more poorly than the CA subgroup on most of the tasks (8/9). However, the SLI group performance only was significantly worse that of the CL subgroup on one of the tasks. A first Discriminant Analysis SLI vs CA established canonical function with Sensitivity 93,5% and Specificity 87,1%. A second Discriminant Analysis SLI vs CL identified a canonical function with Sensitivity 77,4% and Specificity only 54,8%. One semantic task (Definition of words) and another pragmatic task (Scene language) appear to be the best variables for establishing an SLI profile in this psycholinguistics areas. Discuss the implications of these findings for the clinical diagnosis and speech-language pathology.
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