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The purpose of the present study was to identify the characteristics of story comprehension of school-age children with specific language impairment(SLI). Forty-five children participated in this study: 15 children with SLI aged 6;9 - 8;11, 15 normal children matched by their chronological-age (CA controls) and 15 normal children matched by their language-age(LA controls). Three comprehension tasks were used: the literal information task(LI), the text-connecting inference task (TC), and the gap-filling inference task(GF). Each child was asked to perform the comprehension task after they had heard a story by the experimenter. Four stories were used to each child and the order of presentation was counterbalanced among the participants. The results of the present study were as following: First, all three groups showed the highest performance in the LI task and the lowest performance in the GF task. Compared to their CA controls, the SLI group demonstrated significantly inferior performance in all three comprehension tasks. In comparison with the LA controls, the SLI group showed significantly lower performance in the TC and GF tasks, but no group differences in the LI task. In the results of intragroup analysis, the SLI group and the LA controls showed different abilities in all three tasks, but the CA control group showed a difference only between TC and GF tasks. Second, error type analysis of the comprehension tasks showed that all groups produced more ‘inference errors’ than any other error types. Overall, ‘inference errors’ and ‘question scope errors’ were shown more in SLI, LA controls, and CA controls, in order, while ‘understanding errors,’ ‘odd response,’ and ‘don’t know response’ were shown in reverse order. |
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