Speech Disruptions in the Narratives of English-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

These findings suggest that there is a relationship between language ability and speech disruptions. Higher disruption rates at phrase boundaries in children with SLI than in their age-matched peers reflect lexical and syntactic deficits in children with SLI.

Narrativas orais de crianças com desenvolvimento típico de linguagem

“…The absence of statistical significance in age groups, considering the values for narrative time and pause time, is a finding not corroborated elsewhere, since there are studies (18,19) showing an inversely proportional relation between gradual process of linguistic development and interruption in the narrative speech.…”

“…The increased pause time in the storybook narrative seems to be related to cognitive and linguistic gaps, thus evidencing the gradual process of formation of concepts, lexical items and assimilation of syntactic rules for structuring the narrative speech (6,7,8,9,10,11,18). This also might be a strategy for the speaker to get more time to repair the mistakes in the narrative production or even to follow actions such as page changes (18).…”

“…This also might be a strategy for the speaker to get more time to repair the mistakes in the narrative production or even to follow actions such as page changes (18).…”

“…Contextualising the interlocutor in terms of player, actions, place and moment in which the facts take place, when they are telling stories with visual support, can add intermediate and non-visible relations (11,12,15). With increase in age and school level as well as cognitive maturation and linguistic development, the child becomes familiarised with the complex narrative structure and consequently the frequency of breaks (pauses and interjections) is decreased, which makes the narrative more complex and elaborated (4,18,19). Children at school age are expected to understand their teacher's explanations, tell and re-tell stories, and interpret them (14,20).…”

A duração da pausa silente difere entre palavras de classe aberta ou fechada?

“…When specific aspects of language (in particular, syntactic and lexical aspects) are being developed, there is a greater chance of speech disruptions (1,2) . Disfluency is expected during language development as it may reflect the child's uncertainties during sentence planning.…”