The Grammaticality Judgment in School-Aged Children with Specific Language Impairment

Background & Objectives: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are considerably delayed in their entire language ability compared to typically developing children, and have difficulties especially in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes. Metalinguistic awareness, which is the ability to deal with language itself as an object, is developed continuously during school years. The present study's goal was to examine the grammaticality judgment skills of Korean school-aged children with SLI. Methods: Fifteen school-aged children with SLI, 15 chronological age (CA)-matched children and 15 language ability-matched children participated in the present study. The task was to judge the grammatical correctness of 69 sentences, including 7 types of particles, 8 types of conjunctive ending, and 8 types of passive and causative morphemes. Results: In accuracy of grammaticality judgment, the children with SLI showed a significantly lower performance than CA control children. In error correction and clear revision the children with SLI showed a significantly lower performance than the other 2 groups. Additionally, error types in the revision task were different among the 3 groups. Discussion & Conclusion: Although children with SLI responded more slowly than CA-matched children in grammatical judgment tasks, they showed normal developmental patterns. However, the children with SLI showed more content revision errors than other errors, and this pattern was different from the other 2 groups.