Sentence Comprehension of Korean Children with Specific Language Impairments

Hwang, Mina

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2003;8(3): 1-21.

Mina Hwang^`

황민아(Mina Hwang)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the sentence comprehension strategies used by Korean-speaking children with specific language impairment(SLI) within a framework of competition model. Fourteen children with SLI(SLI children)(ages 4;7- 7;2) and 14 age-matched normal children(CA children), and 14 younger children with matching language ages(LA children) participated in the study. In an actout procedure, the children were asked to determine the agents in sentences composed of two nouns and a verb with varying conditions of three cues(case-marker, animacy, and word-order). The results of group comparisons revealed that the SLI children relied animacy cues significantly more than the other two groups of normal children, and the two normal groups did not differ from each other in the use of animacy cues. In terms of case-marker cues, the CA children relied on case-marker cues significantly more than the other two groups, and the SLI children did not differe from the LA children. There were no significant differences between the groups in the use of word-order cues. The results indicated that although the SLI children use case-marker cues as much as the normal children with similar language skills, they tend to rely more on animacy cues when animacy cues are available.