Six‐ and seven‐year‐old ‘normal’ children's talk to peers with severe learning difficulties

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Abstract
Young children have been found to adjust their talk to the perceived linguistic needs of their listeners. These adjustments reflect variables such as listener age, ability, status and/or familiarity. Children with severe learning difficulties (SLD) present ‘normal’ (N) children who have not previously encountered classmates with SLD, with a variety of conflicting cues in which there is a mismatch between apparent age (based on physical size) and actual attainments. Children with SLD also have a variety of causes of developmental delay as well as, in many cases, secondary handicaps. Consequently there are wide intra‐SLD group differences in the linguistic needs of those children. Talk by nine six‐ and seven‐year‐old ‘normal’ children to peers with SLD in an integrated school setting was collected over one school year. Talk was recorded in integration sessions during the periods in which the children worked in N‐‐ SLD cooperative pairs. ‘Normal’ children's talk to SLD partners was characterized by ‘young listener’ features, indicating that the ‘normal’ children responded to developmental cues rather than to more obvious, but misleading, physical cues. The use of ‘young listener’ features tended to intensify with experience of SLD children. There was little evidence that the ‘normal’ children were sensitive to the diverse and varying linguistic needs of individual SLD children.