Eighteen children with specific language impairment (SLI), from 6 to 8 years of age, were compared with 9 control children matched on age and nonverbal ability (CA controls) and with 9 younger control children of comparable language level (LA controls). Half of the SLI group were rated on a teacher checklist as having pragmatic difficulties: these were referred to as the pragmatic language impairment (PLI) group; the remainder were the typical (SLI-T) group. Children's responses to adult soliciting utterances were compared. All children usually responded to conversational solicitations, but children in the PLI group were more likely than control children to give no response, and they also made very little use of nonverbal responses, such as nodding. Nonverbal responding was closely related to the quality of children's responses. Children who failed to use nonverbal responses also had a relatively high level of pragmatically inappropriate responses that were not readily accounted for in terms of limited grammar or vocabulary. This study lends support to the notion that there is a subset of the language-impaired population who have broader communicative impairments, extending beyond basic difficulties in mastering language form, reflecting difficulty in responding to and expressing communicative intents. The analytic methods developed for this project have promise for the study of pragmatic difficulties in other clinical groups.
Six language-impaired children fitting the clinical picture of semantic-pragmatic disorder (mean age 11 years) engaged in conversations with adults in four situations varying in terms of familiarity of the interlocutor (familiar or unfamiliar) and type of setting (interview or toy exploration). These children did not produce more utterances or longer utterances than normally developing children of similar age or ability, but they were more likely to produce utterances that served the conversational function of initiating, rather than responding or acknowledging. This tendency was most pronounced in the toy setting. There was a nonsignificant trend for control children to initiate more with a familiar than with an unfamiliar adult, but no such tendency in the semantic-pragmatic group. A high rate of initiations in children with semantic-pragmatic disorder cannot be regarded as an unusual behavior provoked by the demands of the interview setting, as it is even more apparent during toy exploration, where the child is under less pressure to respond to adult questions.
It is well established that syntactic form and communicative function do not always correspond: for instance, a syntactic question might function as a request for information ("did you see the play?") or a request for acknowledgment when there is no doubt about polarity of the response ("there's a tower at Blackpool, isn't there"). Using data from a corpus of 18 child-adult conversations, we distinguished adult utterances that solicited information from those soliciting acknowledgment (i.e., where the response was predictable, and the utterance served a predominantly social function). Both types of utterance were usually responded to by children, but the form of response differed according to the communicative function of the utterance. Nonverbal and prosodic responses (e.g., nods or "rarah") were significantly more likely to occur in response to utterances soliciting acknowledgment than in response to yes/no questions that solicited information. There were consistent form-function relationships for responses as well as for soliciting utterances. Nonverbal nods and headshakes were not functionally equivalent to verbal "yes" and "no."Those interested in discourse readily appreciate the need to distinguish syntactic form and communicative function. Thus, the syntactic question "Would you mind opening the window?" functions as a (polite) command. The declarative form of "I don't suppose you'd like to come to dinner with me" acts as an invitation. A tag question such as "It's got salt in it, hasn't it?" could be a request for information by an uncertain speaker (perhaps a forgetful cook) or a statement of opinion by a speaker who has no doubt of the truth of the proposi-
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