engleski

Grammatical and orthographic features in written language production of youth with Specific Language Impairment

An extensive body of research suggests that children with Specific language impairment (SLI) have deficit in oral language that cannot be explained in terms of neurological, cognitive or perceptive impairment. Less attention was given to their written language although many empirical data indicated that this group could experience difficulties with writing skills during formal education and later on. Several studies have shown that during written text production children with SLI produced spelling errors - particularly phonological ones - and various grammatical errors. Bishop and Clarkson (2003) claimed that spelling and punctuation were indeed the most dominant types of errors in written text of children with SLI and not the grammatical errors. Since there are no studies focused on the problems beyond single word writing in Croatian, in 2014 we started to develop a Corpus of written language samples - called RAPUT. Texts are produced by persons with various language impairments (developmental and acquired impairment) in different chronological age. In this moment the Corpus contain over 200 000 written tokens (83 000 produced by healthy speakers and around 130 000 produced by speakers with various language disorder such as aphasia, dyslexia, specific language impairment). The purpose of this study is to analyse written texts produced by 20 children with SLI, age 10 to 15. Two types of text - descriptive and narrative - are analysed (around 7 000 tokens). Grammatical and orthographic analysis is performed in order to define typical errors produced by this group of children. Since Croatian is a language with more complex morphology than English while orthographically opposite to English, we predict that grammatical and orthographical errors will be dominant errors in text of SLI children. Our preliminary data are in the line with our hypothesis.

youth with SLI ; writing ; errors ; orthography

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