Mazes in Swedish pre-school children with speci® c language impairment

The present investigation addresses mazes in Swedish pre-school children with speci® c language impairment (SLI). Spontaneous speech samples from 10 Swedish children were collected and analysed with respect to amount of mazes and their distributional patterns. The subjects consisted of ® ve children with SLI and ® ve MLU (mean length of utterance) matched controls with normal grammatical development but with a phonological impairment. Mazes were classi® ed as pauses, repetitions and revisions. The children with SLI were found to have signi® cantly more mazes, in particular repetitions and pauses, than the controls. The repetitions were signi® cantly more often of part-word length in the children with SLI compared to the control group. Finally the repetitions of the children with SLI tended to aA ect lexical and function words equally, whereas they aA ected mainly function words in the controls. The results imply that an analysis of mazes could supplement traditional language testing of children with SLI, and increase our understanding of their speech processing.

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