Syntactic comprehension in children with expressive language impairment*

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Abstract
Two groups of language-impaired children, an 'expressive language impairment' group and a 'development dyspraxic' group, aged between 4 and 6 years, were assessed on a set of test sentences designed to tap syntactic comprehension. Expressive language was profiled for both experimental groups. A control group completed the syntactic comprehension test only. The results indicate that children with apparently isolated defects of expressive syntax do, in fact, have subtle deficits of comprehension in comparison to age-matched controls. The deficit can be detected in a syntactic decoding task. Comprehension strategies used by this group are examined. The 'dyspraxic' group did not perform significantly differently to controls.