Purpose: Unlike traditional implicit approaches used to improve grammatical forms used by children with developmental language disorder, explicit instruction aims to make the learner consciously aware of the underlying language pattern. In this study, we compared the efficacy of an explicit approach to an implicit approach when teaching 3 novel…

The study aims at identifying characteristic phenotypes for children with SLI and children with sensorineural hearing impairment (HI) in language and in domains associated with language. We focus on verbal agreement inflection and phonological short-term memory, phenomena that have been repeatedly found to be impaired in both groups of children. A…

Sixteen adults with language/learning disabilities (L/LD) and 16 controls participated in a study testing sensitivity to word order cues that signaled grammatical versus ungrammatical word strings belonging to an artificial grammar. Participants with L/LD performed significantly below the comparison group, suggesting that this skill is problematic…

A study examined grammatical morphology and sentence imitation in 9 children with specific learning impairments (SLI), 10 with Down syndrome (DS), and 10 controls matched on mean length of utterance. Children with SLI and DS performed significantly more poorly than controls on measures of tense inflections and non-tense morphemes. (Contains…

Fourteen preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) and 12 younger controls were more likely to produce auxiliary "is" to describe target pictures when the preceding sentence contained auxiliary "are" than when it contained past tense. Use of "is" was least likely when the preceding sentence was nonfinite. (Contains references.) (CR)

Spontaneous speech samples from 10 Swedish children were analyzed grammatically. The five subjects (age five) with specific language impairment (SLI) differed from controls in their more restricted usage of word order patterns and number of grammatical errors. Their speech also showed frequent omissions of grammatical morphemes. Results suggest…

These case studies describe and compare the language characteristics of two bilingual children (age 7), one with specific language impairment (SLI). Results found the child with SLI produced significantly more morphosyntactic errors and less variety of grammatical forms and sentence types in both languages, and demonstrated significant…

Children with specific language impairments (eight learning Italian, eight learning English as a first language) were studied for grammatical deficits. Italian-speakers used noun inflections, verb inflections, copula forms more than English-speaking counterparts, matched by utterance length. Articles were used similarly. Results were consistent…

Papers from a British conference on applied linguistics address various aspects of evaluation and language. Articles include: "Grammar and Language Impairment: Clinical Linguistics as Applied Linguistics" (Paul Fletcher); "Putting Our Practice Into Theory" (Deborah Cameron); "Applied Linguistics as Evaluation of Theory and…