How do French-speaking children with specific language impairment first mention a referent in storytelling? Between reference and grammar

Oral narratives in monolingual and bilingual preschoolers with SLI

“…Finally, research indicates that children with SLI have more difficulties than their TD peers in choosing the most appropriate referring expression to mention a referent (Norbury and Bishop , Strong and Shaver ). In particular, the first mention of a referent is especially difficult for children with SLI (de Weck and Jullien , Schneider and Hayward ).…”

Referential Choices and Specific Language Impairment: Sensitivity to Contrast Levels and Grammatical Role

“…De Weck and Jullien (2013) found children with SLI (aged 6-9 years) to produce fewer indefi nite lexical NPs as introductions compared to age-matched controls and, unsurprisingly, fewer appropriate introductions when only indefi nite lexical NPs would be considered as appropriate. The diff erences point towards a problem with taking the addressee's perspective into account in SLI (de Weck & Jullien, 2013). Consistent with this explanation, children with SLI also performed more poorly in referential communication tasks and tended to produce underinformative utterances (Bishop & Adams, 1991;Davies et al, 2016).…”

“…4 However, studies that have examined referential choices of children with SLI have found diff erences between the explicitness of the expressions produced by children with SLI and those produced by typically developing children. At the same time the referential choices of children with SLI reveal sensitivity to similar discourse factors (such as newness and givenness) as those observed with typically developing children (de Weck & Jullien, 2013;Norbury & Bishop, 2003;van der Lely, 1997). These studies have mainly elicited narratives, in which the accessibility status of the referents can vary greatly.…”

“…The explicitness of expressions produced by children with SLI has mainly been examined in relation to the information status of referents (givenness, newness). For example, children with SLI have been shown to prefer lexical NPs for (re)introducing referents just as chronological-age-matched typically developing children do (de Weck & Jullien, 2013;Norbury & Bishop, 2003;van der Lely, 1997), and they produce pronouns for maintaining reference to previously mentioned referents (Norbury & Bishop, 2003;van der Lely, 1997). Children with SLI also appear to show a sensitivity to the grammatical role of the referent (Schelletter & Leinonen, 2003).…”

The management of cohesion in written narratives in students with specific language impairment: Differences between childhood and adolescence

“…Children with SLI still use the latter form until the age of 11 years, whereas its use is marginal after the age of 5 years in TD children. Children with SLI also differ from TD children in their use of specific constructions such as left dislocations (De Weck & Jullien, 2013;Jullien, 2008). Such dislocations are said to promote accessible referents to the status of topic by extracting the lexical unit from the clause to its left periphery and then co-indexing this referent with a pronoun.…”