Specific Language Impairment

In order to investigate the relationship between oral language usage and morphological awareness, 5- to 7-year-old children with specific language impairment (SU) were compared to age-matched (AM) and language-matched (LM) comparison groups on a variety of measures requiring metalinguistic skill. These included sentence completion (involving real and. nonsense words); comprehension of inflected non words; response to morphological errors (including judgment, identifi cation, and repair), and deliberate creation of grammatical violations. Overall, the SLI children performed significantly worse than their AM peers and were indistinguishable from younger LM children, suggest ing that morphological awareness is more closely allied with oral lan guage than with general cognitive/chronological development. The development of linguistic awareness and its relationship to reading and writing has been well examined. Some have argued that good linguistic awareness (particularly phonologi cal awareness) leads to good reading and writing performance (e.g., Bradley and Bryant 1983), while others have suggested 163