The influence of processing mode on the sentence productions of language-disordered and normal children

This study examined the effects of linguistic complexity on children's language encoding performances. There were four groups with 15 subjects each: (a) language-disordered; (b) chronologically-age-matched with normal language abilities; (c) language-age-matched; (d) language-age-matched with articulatory errors. The experimental tasks were sentence repetition and elicitation. Phonological complexity (syllable length of words) was a common factor and syntactic complexity was varied for sentence repetition. For both tasks, errors simplified phonological and syntactic structures. Older normals performed with the fewest errors. The language-disordered children performed like the younger normals on the creative sentence production task, but made many more errors on the sentence repetition task. There was no difference in performance between the language-age-matched groups, for those with and without articulatory errors. The uniform effects of phonological complexity on productions across tasks and groups adds support for a limited processing capacity explanation of phonological disorders within a framework of language and cognitive development.