COPYING ABILITY OF PRESCHOOL CHILDREN WITH DELAYED LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

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Abstract
Ninety-six 2 1/2-year-old children with delayed language development (identified by health visitors) and 100 controls were required to copy four simple items of the Griffiths Mental Development Scales, and were tested on the comprehension and expressive language scales of the Reynell Developmental Language Scales. The index children performed worse than the controls on all four copying tasks, and poor copying performance was related to both impaired language comprehension and expression. Copying by the index children was also poorer than their performance on two other non-verbal tasks. The implications for the assessment of children with delayed language development are considered, as well as theoretical implications with regard to the cognition/language debate.