Referential communication in bilingual Catalan-Spanish children with Specific Language Impairment

Resum

The aim of the present study was to analyse the quality of messages produced by Catalan-Spanish children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) during a referential communication task, as compared to age-matched controls at 8 years of age. Children described ten objects arranged in a picture, being some of them ambiguous. Verbal exchanges were transcribed and coded in CHAT format. Results showed that children with SLI produced fewer initial and final correct messages than their age-matched controls and adults used the same type of communicative regulations with both groups. Furthermore, morphosyntactic level assessed at age 7 did not predict the number of correct messages in the referential communication task one year later. We believe that the key difficulty in this task for children with SLI might not be exclusively linguistic and involves the analysis of the communicative context, the ability to extract the relevant information and to consider the adults’ perspectives in order to allow them do the task correctly.