Discourse sentence interaction in the speech of language-disordered and normal children

The effects of linguistic complexity were examined on children's story discourse. Four groups of 15 subjects each were used: (a) language-disordered; (b) chronologically age matched with normal language abilities; (c) language-age matched; and (d) language-age matched with articulatory errors. The experimental task was sentence production in a story context. Phonological complexity (syllable length of words) was varied. Errors simplified phonological, syntactic and story structures. Older normals exhibited the fewest phonological errors and the greatest mean-length complexity for the sentences produced. The language-disordered children made more phonological errors than the younger normals, although they did not differ from the younger normals in the mean-length sentence complexity. No differences occurred in the number of phonological errors or mean-length sentence complexity between the language-age-matched groups, ones with and without articulatory errors. All four groups exhibited similar story structure. The consistent effects of phonological complexity during story production lends support for a limited processing capacity explanation of children's language disorders.