The Uiqiversit)! of ReadingIt has been proposed that grammatical specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized as a deficit affecting only feature-related aspects of grammar. The research reported here indicates a wider irnpairnient involving aspects of grammar not determined by feature checking. in particular to the structure of the verb phrase (VP) with resultative s~condary predication. The results of two video elicitation tasks showed children with SLI to have a significant deficit on such VP constructions compared with chronological age matches and younger vocabulary matches. These findings are accounted for by the deficit in dependency relations proposed by van der Lely (1996) to the effect that nonbinary syntactic dependencies are vulnerable in grammatical SLI. Additionally, it is shown that research using mean length of utterance matching of children with SLI may obscure syntactic problems revealed by matching with younger children on another language trait.

This paper examines to what extent the profile of a child's expressive language performance is influenced by different elicitation procedures. One procedure takes the form of free conversation, where the experimenter prompts the child with topics of a general kind and tries to elicit a wide range of structures and tenses; the other procedure centres around a stick-on game and is hence very much based in the here-and-now.The study is embedded in a current MRC funded project at Reading which has been outlined previously in Fletcher et al (1986) and Johnson (1986). In measures that confounded the two procedures, Fletcher et al found that measures of length and syntactic complexity (MLU, Verb typetoken ration, complex clause proportion) did not discriminate between 5and 7-year-olds; one measure which did seem to be important in distinguishing them, however, was temporal adverbials. The question arises as to whether, if the two elicitation procedures are treated separately, the same similarities and differences appear between the 5-and 7-year-olds.For a group of 15 normal children, at the age levels 5 and 7, and 12 language-impaired subjects, measures of length, lexis and syntactic complexity are compared for the two procedures and across groups. In addition, the frequencies of temporal and locative adverbials for each group on each technique are contrasted.The results reveal differences in expressive language performance for the two procedures. For free conversation, scores on the length and complexity measures are generally higher and significant differences between groups emerge on some measures. The developmental trends on temporal adverbials are maintained. The implications of this are discussed.