Faculty of Philosophy, Institute of Special Education and Rehabilitation
Abstract
The objective of this study is the research of specificlanguage impairments as manifested inSlovene language. The research focuses on languageprocessing in order to determine syntactic,deficit.It has been predicted, that SLI children will meetwith difficulties in the language of all elements thatmark syntactic dependency.The research has been carried out on a sample of 71children with SLI and of 71 children with normallanguage development, all pupils from first tofourth grade of primary school. The children fromboth groups were matched by sex, socio-economicstatus and school environment.This study presents an analysis of repetitions of tensentences designed in such way that some syntacticelements have been varied.The variables of language processing and those ofmorpho syntactic command were obtained from theelicited repetition task (including different syntacticallycomplex structures).The results show, that SLI children use certainstructure less frequently than age controls and thatthere are not only statistically important differencesin the majority of the sentences with differentsyntactic complexity, but also that the tasks appliedcan differentiate specific language impairments aswell. The research has put up some syntactic deficitof SLI in Slovene language as they can be identifiedby means of targeted sentences.In syntax, children with SLI have problemswith depended relations, with languageprocessing and structuring of coordinate andsubordinate clauses and also in the simplesentences. Furthermore, they have problems withsubject-predicate agreement and, when they repeatsentences, with coordinate elements
