Repair of overlapping speech in the conversations of specifically language-impaired and normally developing children

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Abstract
This study examined the manner in which 10 specifically language-impaired (SLI) children and their linguistically normal chronological age (CA) and language age (LA) matched peers repaired overlapping speech. Conversational samples were elicited by an adult examiner from each subject. Instances of overlapping speech were analyzed as being either sentence initial or sentence internal (Gallagher & Craig, 1982). Both types of overlaps were then examined to determine if they required repair, and if so, how they were repaired. It was found that the proportional occurrence of both types of overlap was relatively similar across all three groups. Further, the frequency and nature of repair following sentence initial overlaps was similar across all three groups. However, SLI subjects produced a significantly greater number of unrepaired sentence internal overlaps than did either their CA or LA matched peers.