European Journal of Disorders of Communication, 27,325-342 (1992) 0 The College of Speech Therapists, London

325

Characteristics of children with specific language impairment attending language units Gina Conti-Ramsden, Christopher Donlan and John Grove Centrefor Educational Guidance and Special Needs, School of Education, Universityof Manchester, UK

ABSTRACTS The characteristics of children with specific language impairment (SLI) attending four language units in the north-west of England are examined. The present study involved I5 children with SLI and two sets of control groups: a same-age group and an MLU-matched group (MLU = mean length of utterance). Results are discussed in terms of the following questions: Do children with SLI attending language unitsfit the classic definition of SLI? Can children with SLI be categorised as having expressive versus receptive language problems? What other aspects of educational attainment such as reading, maths and science are affected by SLI? The paper ends with implications for future research. L'article examine les caractkristiques d'enfants souffrant de dkficiences spkcifi ques du langage ('SLI' dans le texte en anglais) et qui frkquentent quatre centres de soins correctifs du langage dans le nord-ouest de I'Angleterre. Il's'agit en l'occurrence de quinze enfants atteints de dificiences spkcifiques du langage et de deux groupes de contr6le: un groupe du m&me hge et un autre comparable pour la longueur moyenne de ses knoncks. La discussion des risultats porte sur les points suivants: Ces enfants atteints de dificiences spkcifiques du langage et qui frkquentent des centres correcteurs du langage correspondent-ils a la dkfinition classique de la dkficience sptcifique du langage? Peut-on opkrer une distinction plus fine des enfants atteints de dkficiences spkcifiques du langage selon qui'ils auraient des problkmes, soit dexpression, soit de rkception? Quelles sont les conskquences des dificiences spkcifiques du langage sur les autres aspects de l'enseignement, comme l'apprentissage de la lecture, des mathkmatiques et des matikres scientifiques? En conclusion l'article Pvoque certaines possibilitks de recherches ultkrieures. Wir untersuchten die Eigenschaften von Kindern mit einer spezifischen Sprachstorung (SLI), die vier Sprachheilschulen in Nordwestengland besuchten. Diese Studie umfasste fiinfzehn Kinder mit SLI und zwei Kontrollgruppen: eine in demselben Alter und eine mit einer angepassten Durchschnittslange von Ausserungen. Die Ergebnisse werden mit Bezug auf die folgenden Fragen besprochen: haben die Kinder rnit SLI in den Sprachheilschulen eine S L I nach der klassischen Definition? Kann man Kinder rnit SLI in Gruppen rnit expressiven gegeniiber rezeptiven Sprachproblemen einteilen? Welche anderen Aspekte der Schulleistung, wie z. B. Lesen, Mathe und Wissenschafi, werden von SLI beeinflusst? Dieses Referat schliesst rnit Folgerungen in Bezug auf weitere Forschung.

Key words: specific language impairment, language units.

326

CONTI-RAMSDEN, DONLAN AND GROVE

INTRODUCTIOY

The identification of children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a universally recognised and continuing challenge for clinicians and researchers interested in understanding and helping such children (Lahey, 1988; McCauley & Demetras, 1990). The identification of children with SLI is particularly complicated given the heterogeneity of the language problems present in these children (Stark & Tallal, 198l), the diversity in the aetiology of SLI (Leonard, 1987), and our lack of understanding of the factors affecting prognosis (Bishop & Edmundson, 1987). In addition, the identification of children with SLI rests mainly on exclusion criteria. SLI is defined as impaired language development with several factors not considered as present, including the following: not the result of sensory impairment; not the result of emotional and/or behavioural problems; not associated with global cognitive impairments (Bishop & Rosenbloom, 1987). Of particular concern is the issue of distinguishing those children who have transient SLI from those who have more persistent impairments. In a recent study by Bishop and Edmundson (1987) it was found that approximately 37% of children who were found to be SLI at 4 years of age were no longer so by 5;6 years of age. Interestingly, they also found that 22% of the SLI children referred to in their study actually had global cognitive delays as measured by a performance of two standard deviations below the mean in the Leiter test of non-verbal ability (Leiter, 1948). These globally delayed children had much poorer prognoses than children without such cognitive impairments. Similar findings can be found in the study by Stark and Tallal (1981) where the global delay group formed some 38% of children in their study of SLI. Another issue involves the division of SLI into ‘receptive’ and ‘expressive’. It had been thought that receptive impairments had concurrent expressive problems as the result of input difficulties, whilst expressive difficulties were thought to be relatively ‘pure’ with comprehension unaffected. Recent research, nevertheless, has challenged this dichotomy and shown that children with expressive SLI appear to have some degree of comprehension problems (Bishop, 1979; Adams, 1990). It would be of particular interest for research to continue to look more closely at the possible comprehension problems of children with SLI. Since the 1960s the education system in England has allowed special status to SLI children with persistent problems. A wide range of models of intervention is current, from full-time special school placement to the provision of part-time support in mainstream schools. Language units located in mainstream schools and catering specifically for children with SLI are of particular interest as they appear to be the most common provision made for children with persistent problems. There are currently about 300 language units in England and Wales operating on widely diverse principles from highly specialised to highly integrated (Hutt & Donlan, 1987). The question then arises as to the characteristics of children with SLI attending language units. Research on such children has been conspicuously lacking and what research has been done has focused on particular areas such as the following: the integration of children with SLI attending language units (Hurford & Hart, 1979; Parkes, 1990); particular teaching methods used in

CHARACTERISTICS OF SLI CHILDREN ATENDING LANGUAGE UNITS

327

language units, e.g. computer technology (Burton, Meeks & Wright, 1991); and the actual organisation of the educational provision afforded by language units (Hutt & Donlan, 1987). There is a dearth of research involving the characteristics of children with SLI attending language units, with some exceptions such as the in-depth study of a language unit by Pocklington and Hegarty (1982) where 11 children with SLI and their provision are described in detail. This study is descriptive and, although invaluable, lacks the insight provided by studies involving control groups. Thus, the following questions still remained to be fully answered: 1. Do children attending language units fit the classic definition of SLI? 2. Can these children be categorised as having expressive versus receptive difficulties? 3. What about other aspects of educational attainment such as reading and mathematical abilities?

The present study attempted to answer the above questions by studying in detail children with SLI attending four language units in the north-west of England. METHODS

The Subjects

Four language units attached to mainstream schools in the north-west of England participated in the study. These language units had similar admission criteria in that they all accepted children with specific language impairment with normal intelligence and no accompanying global cognitive delays. In addition, one of the units did not cater for cleft palate children. For this study, the criteria for selection of the target SLI group consisted of: (1) attendance at one of the four units, and (2) being in year 2 (i.e. children who were 7 years of age during the school year) and thus being eligible to be examined using the Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) designed for all 7 year olds nationally. A total of 15 target children with SLI participated in the study. Two sets of control children were also recruited. The first control group, the age-control group, was selected according to the following four criteria: the control child had to be from the same school, age and sex as the target SLI child and, in addition, the age-control child had to have similar nonverbal abilities as measured by the Differential Ability Scales (Elliot, 1990). Fifteen age-control children who met all the above criteria participated in the study. The second control group, the group matched for mean length of utterance or the MLU group, was selected according to the following three criteria: the control child had to be from the same school and the same sex as the target SLI child and, in addition, the MLU-control child had to have similar mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes as described by Miller (1981). The MLU calculations were based on language samples of two sets of teacher-child conversations taken from the Renfrew (1989) Action Picture Test and the Renfrew (1977) Bus Story. Only six MLU-control children who fitted all the criteria were able to participate in the study. Table 1 presents the characteristics of the 36 children participating in the study.

6;6 7;1

6;6 6;6 7;O 7;2

6;9 6;5 6;6

7;O 7 ;O 7;3 6;lO 6;8 7;O

Age-control

MLU-control

nguage-impaired target group. ial Abilities Scale. ngth of utterance in morphemes.

years)

Age (years)

M

M M

M

M

F M

M

M M

M

M

F

M

M

M

M

M

M M

M

M

M

M

M

M M

M M

M

Age-control

SLI

Sex

~

MLU-control

~~~

97 69

89 106 111 69

90.5 106 92.5

115 115 92.5 75 86 107.5

SLI

Table 1: Characteristics of the subjects participating in the study.

92.5 87.5

86 95 106 73

95 106 97

115 106 95 79 86 106

Age-control

DAS

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

6.00 6.15 5.79 4.60 5.28 5.34

MLU-control

5.68 5.92 5.64 4.27 5.44 5.41

SLI

MLU

Years in unit to 1/1/1991

2;o

1;o

1 ;4

2;4

1;9

2;o

2;3

1;11

1;4

1 ;4

0;11

1;4

2;6

1;o

1 ;4

Age at time of study (years)

6;lO

6;9

7;l

7;2

6;s

6;7

6;9

6;5

6;6

6;5

6;5

7;l

7;2

6;6

7:l

Low birth weight, oxygen deprived, difficulties in word finding, blends and whole utterances, selects objects by description, uncooperative avoidance strategies Slight hearing loss, inconsistent, language difficulties with prepositions, instructions, pronoun confusion, word finding and tense

Speech problem with particular sounds, disruptive, little self-discipline, unable to read but could speak in sentences Delayed physical development, poor gross and fine motor skills, unable to interact effectively, disruptive, unable to make himself understood Unable to work unsupervised, slight hearing loss, diagnosed as language delayed, chromosomal abnormality, good reading without understanding Substance abuse during mother’s pregnancy, overall development delay, visual impairment, understands two-word structures and follows instructions after thought, misuses conjunctions and tense

Maternal family language disability, poor listening and attention skills, no eye contact, immature fine motor skills Word-finding difficulty, syntax difficulty, language taken at literal meaning, good listening skills but limited understanding Normal development arrested after infant babbling and one-word stage, pragmatic and syntactic difficulties, debate over languagehehaviour priority, tantrums, dislikes change

Intermittent hearing loss, otitis media, poor auditory skills, language difficult to interpret, occasional three-word utterances, dyspraxic element Unintelligible speech, used gesture to convey meaning, velar sounds fronted and limited range of consonants Phonology problem, sound system missing, comprehension within normal limits, basic numeracy known, dribbles Elective whisper to adults, visuaVmotor and visual discrimination poor, immature phonology and language, colours and numbers not known Understands two element instructions, one-word utterances, frustration due to inability to find the correct word Little auditory discrimination or perception, poor visual discrimination, very immature, uses signs for basic needs, some number skills but drawing immature

Nature of difficulties on entry to unit

Table 2: The SLI children.

h)

\o

w

v)

z--I

c

R

D

c

G)

5 z

G)

z z

rn

3z

n rn z

0

I-

z

0

R E

E v)

4d

0

D n D

I

0

CONTI-RAMSDEN, DONLAN AND GROVE

330

As can be seen from Table 1 most of the children participating in the study were male (94%). Each age-control child was matched within +5 months of the target SLI child’s chronological age and within one standard deviation (15 points) in his or her standard score on the Differential Ability Scales (DAS). There was nevertheless one exception. The last target child with SLI in Table 1 with a DAS standard score of 69 could only be matched with an age-control with a DAS standard score of 87.5. Similarly, each MLU-control child was matched within 0.35 of a morpheme of the MLU obtained for each target SLI child. On average, the MLU-control children were 2;9 years younger than the target SLI children. Table 2 provides the basic history for each of the target SLI children from case notes found in the school records. The Profiles

In order to examine the characteristics of children with SLI attending the language units, in comparison to the control groups, a series of standardised tests and assessment tasks were carried out for each individual child with the purpose of obtaining a profile of the child’s strengths and weaknesses. Table 3 presents a list of the tests and tasks used in the study. Table 3: Standardised tests and assessment tasks used in the study. ~

1. The Differential Abilities Scales (DAS) 2. The Young Group Reading Test 3. The Test of Reception of Grammar (TROG) 4. The British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BVPS) 5. The Bus Story 6. The Action Picture Test (APT) 7. The Monsters ‘repeat, read and write’ task 8. Count efficiency task 9. Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) in English, mathematics and science

The children were observed and tested throughout a period of approximately 7 months. The tasks were introduced at times when the children appeared alert and cooperative and were only carried out after the examiner had been familiar with the child and visiting the school regularly for a period of at least one month. The following is a brief description of each of the tasks used. The Differential Ability Scales The DAS scales (Elliot, 1990) are an improvement over the well-known British Ability Scales (BAS) (Elliot, Murray & Pearson, 1979). For the purposes of the present study, the matrices were used to derive a non-verbal standard score as suggested by the manual. The matrices involves the child choosing from among four or six choices the figure that correctly completes the matrix. The Young Group Reading Test A group reading test was chosen in order to simplify the task and to speed administration (Young, 1968). This test involves the identification of words and sentence completion from a multiple-choice format. The Test of Reception of Grammar (TROG) The TROG (Bishop, 1983) is a standardised instrument which assesses children’s comprehension of grammatical structures.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SLI CHILDREN AlTENDING LANGUAGE UNITS

331

The British Picture Vocabulary Scales (BPVS) The BPVS (Dunn, Dunn, Whetton & Pintilie, 1982) measures a child’s understanding of words. It is particularly useful because it is standardised over a wide age range which included that of the younger MLU-control children. The Bus Story The Bus Story (Renfrew, 1977) is designed to assess the ability of children to produce consecutive speech. For this study, the information score was derived which provides a measure of the child’s ability to express the main ideas of a story. The transcriptions from this task were also used as one of the samples from which the MLUs were calculated. The Action Picture Test (APT) The APT (Renfrew, 1989) has as its purpose the provision of a standardised context from which to obtain a sample of a child’s spoken language. This sample is then evaluated in terms of information delivery and grammatical structures used. These samples were also used as one of the sources for the computation of the MLUs. The Monster task This task was developed by Bishop and Adams (1990) to examine the ability of a child to repeat, read and write nonsense words. The task consists of 16 pictures of funny monsters arranged into two sets of eight. The children are asked to repeat after the adult and write the first set and to read the names on the second set of cards. The count efficiency task This task was developed from work by Case, Kurland and Goldberg (1982) and provides a measure of speed in counting dot patterns; children are required to count aloud and touch each dot they count. A full description of this task is presented in Appendix I. Standard Assessment Tasks

In Britain, instruments have been developed to assess children’s performance and progress in education. National assessments are carried out when British children are 7, 11, 14 and 16 years of age. At age 7 each child is given three Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) designed to cover the three core areas of the National Curriculum: English, Maths and Science. These tasks for 7 year olds are not paper and pencil tests but instead involve activities administered as a natural extension of the teaching process. The results for the SATs provided for 7 year olds in Britain in the areas of English, maths and science were obtained for the target SLI group and the age-control group. RESULTS The Standardised Tasks

The means and standard deviations for each of the standardised tests used with the three groups of children are presented in Table 4. Figure 1 presents these means in pictorial form. To make statistical comparisons the

CONTI-RAMSDEN, DONLAN AND GROVE

332

Table 4: Mean (x) and standard deviations (s.d.) of standard scores obtained from the standardised tests used. ~

Test

Language impaired

Age control

MLU control

1. DAS 94.7 15.5

95.0 11.2

-

88.7 9.9

101.1 11.6

-

79.7 9.9

95.3 15.9

-

71.5 11.4

94.3 15.5

91.0 5.9

65.3 19.4

94.6 10.4

103.7 10.3

56.0 s.d. 26.5 7. APT - Information i 81.7 s.d. 25.8

90.5 12.8

99.5 13.3

104.6 9.0

113.5 12.1

f

s.d. 2. Young x

s.d. 3. TROG f

s.d. 4. BPVS X

s.d. 5. Bus Story x

s.d. 6. APT - Grammar f

-

non-parametric Wilcoxon rank sum test and Spearman’s correlations were used. Results showed significant differences between the SLI group and the agecontrol group for all standardised tests used except for the DAS which was used actually to match the two groups of children. Children with SLI obtained significantly lower standard scores than age controls in the following test: Young Group Reading Test (nl = 15, n2 = 15, R = 149.5, P < 0.001); in the Test of Reception of Grammar or TROG (nl = 15, n2 = 15, R = 160.5, P < 0.005); in the British Picture Vocabulary Scale or BPVS (nl = 15, n2 = 15, R = 148.5, P < 0.001); in the Bus Story-Information (n, = 15, n2 = 15, R = 134.5, P < 0.001); in the Action Picture Test-Grammar (nl = 15, n2 = 15, R = 146, P < 0.001); and in the Action Picture Test-Information (nl = 15, n2 = 15, R = 153, P < 0.001). Standard deviation information for the Bus Story-Information, APT-Grammar and APT-Information point to the enormous spread of performance of SLI children and the lack of homogeneity present in the group. Comparisons between the children with SLI and the MLU-control children were carried out using the actual raw scores and not the standard scores. Standard scores provide information as to how a child does in comparison with his or her age group. If standard scores were compared, the findings would almost invariably show that SLI children perform worse than MLU children as both are being compared with their own age group. What may be the case is that children with SLI behave more like younger normal children of the same language stage. In order to investigate this possibility further, the raw scores of the two groups of children were compared for all the standardised

CHARACTERISTICS OF SLI CHILDREN ATENDING LANGUAGE UNITS

DAS

Young

TROG

BPVS

Bus* Inf

APTt Gram

333

APT Inf

Tests used Figure 1 : Group results of standardised tasks (mean standard scores): (M target ) SLI children (n = 15); (A-A) Age-control children (n = 15);(.-H) MLU-control children (n = 15);Gram = grammar; Inf = information. * Standard scores for the Bus Story were derived by obtaining the raw standardised data from C.E. Renfrew, calculating the mean and standard deviation (the latter is not published in the manual) by age group, finding Z scores per child and then converting it into standard scores. t Given that the manual published mean and standard deviations for age groups, it was possible to find the 2 scores per child and then convert them into standard scores.

tests given. It was found that SLI children did not differ from younger MLUcontrol children in any of the tests used. SLI children obtained similar scores to MLU-control children in the British Picture Vocabulary Test (nl = 6, n2 = 6, R = 30, P > 0.10); in the Bus Story-Information (n, = 6, n2 = 6, R = 38, P > 0.10); in the Action Picture Test-Grammar (nl = 6, n2 = 6, R = 32.5, P > 0.10); and in the Action Picture Test-Information (nl = 6, n2 = 6, R = 37, P > 0.10). Figure 2 presents the mean for the raw scores obtained for each of the two groups of children.

CONTI-RAMSDEN, DONLAN AND GROVE

I

i

BPVS

Bus Inf

I

APT Gram Tests used

I

APT Inf

Figure 2 : Mean raw scores for standardised tasks: ( U target )SLI children (n = 6); (A-A) MLU-control children (n = 6); Gram = grammar; Inf = Information.

OTHER TASKS The Monster task tapped the ability of children to read and spell non-words. This task was used in order to ascertain whether children with SLI use different strategies from age-control children in order to read. Specifically, this task investigated the possibility that children with SLI may have difficulty learning phonics and so may rely more heavily on learning whole orthographic patterns, in which case they would be particularly poor at non-word reading and spelling. Table 5 presents the mean number of phonemes correctly read and spelt for each group of children. It was found that the children with SLI had a significantly smaller number of correct phonemes and thus a greater number of phoneme errors than the age-control children in both reading (nl = 15, n2 = 15, R = 166,P < 0.005) and spelling (nl = 15, n2 = 15, R = 166, P < 0.005). These results did not change when the two children in the SLI group who appeared to have global delay (a DAS non-verbal score of less than two

CHARACTERISTICS OF SLI CHILDREN ATTENDING LANGUAGE UNITS

335

Table 5: Means and standard deviations* for number of phonemes correct (out of 25) in reading and spelling non-words.

Non-word

-

reading

Non-word - spelling

Language impaired

Age control

11.3 (8.6) 7.1 (6.7)

19.1 (5.9) 14.9 (7.5)

* Standard deviations appear in parentheses.

standard deviations below the mean, i.e. a standard score of less than 70) were removed from the calculations. In addition, correlations between the standardised tests used and the Monster ‘read and spell’ task revealed positive correlations between the scores of children with SLI in the Young Group Reading Test and the number of phonemes correctly read in the Monster task ( n = 15, p = 0.73, P < 0.05); and between the British Picture Vocabulary Scale and the number of phonemes correctly read in the Monster task (n = 15, p = 0.65, P < 0.05). No other correlations were found. The next task used was the Count Efficiency Task. It was found that children with SLI as a group were as accurate as age-control children in counting from one to ten. One hundred per cent of the age-control children got seven or eight trials correct (out of a possible eight correct) and 80% of the children with SLI got seven or eight trials correct. The remaining 20% of children with SLI performed poorly, and two of the children in the SLI group (one with global delay and one without) showed very poor accuracy. Nevertheless, the time children took to arrive at a correct answer differed significantly for the two groups of children (n, = 15, n2 = 15, R = 179, P < 0.025). On average, children with SLI took 0.7 second per correct dot counted (standard deviation = O S ) , whilst age-control children took an average of 0.5 second per correct dot counted (standard deviation = 0.1). Finally, as far as Standard Assessment Tasks are concerned, three out of the four language units entered their year 2 pupils with SLI for assessment in the National Curriculum. One language unit opted out of the national assessment for the children with SLI. The administration of the SATs varied widely from unit to unit. Some SATs were given in the mainstream schools, some were administered in the unit. Similarly, some teachers adhered very closely to the test instructions whilst others attempted some modifications. Thus, the results are very much preliminary and include 12 children with SLI and 12 age-control children. Table 6 presents the results for the Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) in the three core subjects: English, Maths and Science. These tasks assess children at the end of Key Stage 1 to monitor their progress. Most 7 year olds are expected to have attained Level 2 in all the core subjects. As can be seen from Table 6, children with SLI fall behind in all core subjects with particular difficulties in English, and quite varied but poor performance in Maths and Science.

CONTI-RAMSDEN, DONLAN AND GROVE

336

Table 6: Standard Assessment Tasks (SA Ts) results.

English SLI Age controls Maths SLI Age controls Science SLI Age control

(YO)

W (YO)

Level 1 (YO)

Level 2

20 -

50 35

30 65

-

20 -

58 8

25 61

25

Level 3 (%)

-

W = working towards Level 1. SLI = specific language-impaired group.

DISCUSSION

The present study, although small in scale, provides a variety of results which deserve further discussion. Histories and performance in a variety of tasks showed that most children with SLI attending language units are children who have a major and specific language impairment in the absence of cognitive difficulties, emotionalhehavioural problems and significant sensory loss. Teachers from the language units participating in this study all emphasised that the aim of the unit was to cater for children with normal intellectual abilities and no global delays. Nevertheless, they were not entirely successful in this aim. Two out of the 15 SLI children participating in this study (13%) had global cognitive delay. These results are in line with others who found that a proportion of children treated as SLI (as many as one-third) appear to have global problems (Stark & Tallal, 1981; Bishop & Edmundson, 1987). It may well be that, on entering the unit, these globally delayed children do not present a clear cognitive picture and only with time do the global delays become more obvious. For these children, transfer to special schools is an option that is often considered by the teachers in the language units. Nevertheless, the issue remains as to whether a child with cognitive delays can still have a specific language impairment if there is a significant gap between his or her non-verbal and verbal abilities. This task is more difficult than it first appears, as not only must scores be compared across tests but also decisions taken as to which test will be diagnostic of verbal and non-verbal abilities. In the present study, the two globally delayed children (Leiter standard score of 69) obtained standard scores of between 60 and 70 in all the standardised tests of verbal ability except for the APT - Grammar, where their scores fell in the 30s. This investigation took particular care in choosing tests that could provide standard scores, so comparisons across different abilities could be made. McCauley and Demetras (1990) criticise research involving children with SLI as relying mainly on the use of age-equivalent scores which fail to take into account individual differences. Instead, they recommend the use of standard scores as has been done in this study. Test results suggest that children with SLI attending language units present both receptive and expressive language difficulties. As a group, children with SLI had a poorer understanding of words

CHARACTERISTICS OF SLI CHILDREN AlTENDlNG LANGUAGE UNITS

337

and of grammatical structures (BPVS and TROG) with accompanying difficulties formulating complex grammatical structures and using expressive language to convey information (Bus Story and APT). In terms of their language, children with SLI behaved more like younger normal children of the same language stage. These results are in line with the work of Bishop (1979) and Adams (1990): it appears that SLI children with persistent problems who are attending language units have both expressive and receptive language difficulties. Nevertheless, all children did not present the same profiles. An examination of the standard deviations showed a great deal of variability in the scores obtained by children with SLI in the expressive measures such as the Bus Story and the Action Picture Test. No such large variability was found in the receptive test scores such as the Test of Reception of Grammar or the British Picture Vocabulary Scales. Future research on individual differences in children with SLI should prove useful in further characterising subgroups of such children. The reading abilities of SLI children have come into an area where debate over the relationship between oral language problems and literacy difficulties is still ongoing (Bishop & Adams, 1990). In the present study it was found that the children with SLI attending language units performed significantly more poorly than their age control in the Young Group Reading Test, a test involving multiple-choice word recognition. Simply, children with SLI were not as able as age-control peers to recognise the word representing a picture from a choice of four. Furthermore, the results of the Monster task, which involved reading and spelling non-words, revealed that children with SLI had particular difficulties with learning phonics and are particularly poor at reading and spelling non-words. These findings are in line with the work of Ellis and colleagues (Ellis & Large, 1988; Ellis, 1990) with normal language-learning children. They found that for children who are just about to learn to read, phonological skills promote the acquisition of letter knowledge and along with short-term memory provide the necessary skills for the first stages of reading. Furthermore, they found that by 6 years of age, phonological awareness and verbal short-term memory were by far the strongest associates of successful reading. Thus, it is not surprising that children with SLI have difficulties with reading when they present with difficulties in phonological awareness. These results are also consistent with Gathercole and Baddeley’s (1990) finding that children with SLI are poorer at repeating non-words and recalling word lists than younger children of the same language stage. They suggest that this is due to a deficit of phonological storage in working memory which has effects on the language learning of children with SLI and which also has effects at critical stages of their reading acquisition. Some supporting evidence for this claim comes from our correlational finding between the British Picture Vocabulary Scale and this Monster ‘read and spell’ task. It appears that children with SLI who have difficulty with phoneme recognition also have difficulty in vocabulary acquisition (see also Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989; Gathercole, Willis & Baddeley, 1991). Nevertheless it is important to be particularly careful not to draw a causal link based on correlational information. Further research examining this possibility should prove fruitful for understanding the nature of the reading difficulties of children with SLI.

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The above results are also consistent with the line of research that views early language delay as leading on to later literacy problems (Fundudis, Kolvin & Garside, 1979; Richman, Stevenson & Graham, 1982; Silva, Williams & McGee, 1987). Specifically, a positive and significant correlation between the performance of children with SLI in the Young Group Reading Test and phonemes correctly read in the Monster task was found. This line of research, nevertheless, has been criticised by Bishop and Adams (1990) as having methodological difficulties in terms of sampling procedures. It appears that research in this area defined children with SLI by using poor performance on some index of language only without regard to general cognitive abilities. Thus, Bishop and Adams argue that those children with SLI who appear to have literacy difficulties are most likely to be those with more global delays. This argument does not hold for the present study. In this study, most of the children were of normal non-verbal abilities and the results of the reading tasks did not change once the two children with global delays were excluded from the analysis. However, it is important to point out that difference in the samples used in the present study and that of Bishop and Adams may well account for the difference in the findings. Interestingly, when Bishop and Adams divide their group into a global delay group, a good outcome group and a poor outcome group, our results are consistent with their findings on the poor outcome group, suggesting that children with SLI attending language units are children with persistent problems who experience significant literacy difficulties. What this study cannot disentangle is whether the oral language difficulties in some way cause the reading difficulties (although the problems with phonics and the correlational findings suggests a possible link) or if oral language difficulties are independent of later literacy problems. Future research in this area should prove fruitful for the management of SLI children with persistent problems. The performance of children with SLI in other areas where symbolic representation is necessary has interested researchers since the late 1960s (Lovell, Hoyle & Siddall, 1968; Kamhi, Catts, Mauer, Ape1 & Gentry, 1988). Mathematical abilities are of particular interest because of their educational relevance. In the present study, the Count Efficiency Task used involved both a motoric element (physically touching the dots), a counting or processing element, as well as a verbal element (saying what the answer is). It was found that SLI children are as able as age peers to deal with the basic concept of number and to generate the numbers accurately in counting from one to ten. Where the difference was found was in the timing. Children with SLI are losing out in time in order to maintain accuracy. It took children with SLI significantly longer to correctly count the dots than it did age peers. Case et al. (1982) compared Count Efficiency scores of normally developing children with a measure of short-term memory for numbers. They found that both Count Efficiency and short-term memory for numbers increase with age in an exact linear relationship. Case et al. proposed that the shortterm memory demands made in all sorts of mathematical activities can only be met if the child’s number system has reached a certain level of efficiency as measured by count speed. Simple Count Efficiency differences, sensitive as

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they are to the kind of speech problems and motor difficulties characteristic of SLI children, might seem less than crucial when they do not have major effects on count accuracy. But, it is likely that they represent important capacity limitations which may have pervasive repercussions. Some support for this view is offered by Hitch and McAuley (1991). These researchers were surprised to find that 9 year olds with arithmetical learning difficulties (quite a different group from the children with SLI in the present study) were significantly poorer than controls on a number of basic counting tasks, including the Count Efficiency Task described here. Further research in this area with children with SLI is very much needed. Finally, the educational achievement of children with SLI as measured by the Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) in the three core subjects points to a rather bleak reality for these children. The children with SLI performed very poorly in the three core subjects when compared with their age peers. Most SLI children performed at Level 1 or below in the three core subjects. This performance is not surprising, nevertheless, as it is known that children with SLI have difficulties with the very medium of instruction, i.e. language. However, the SAT results are not informative. Despite the preliminary nature of the data, the relationship between the characteristics of the children and the SAT results (using Spearman’s p) was examined. No significant correlations were found between any of the standardised test scores and SLI children’s performance in the English or Maths SATs, indicating that the SATs are not sensitive to the sorts of problems experienced by children with SLI. In addition, only one significant correlation was found: between the Test of Reception of Grammar (TROG) and SAT performance in science for the SLI group ( p = 0.791, P < 0.05) and for the age-control group (p = 0.791, P < 0.05). All other correlations between the standardised tests used and SAT performance in Science were nonsignificant. Although correlational findings should be interpreted with due caution, such a correlation suggests that children (with SLI or normal control) who had better understanding of language in terms of grammar, performed better in SAT Science. This may well point to the role of language and the understanding of instructions (which may contain complex grammatical structures) in learning Science. Our findings suggest that children with SLI are basically bright children who have specific deficits. Apart from their linguistic deficits the present study has underlined the role of two specific cognitive deficits associated with SLI: learning phonics and count efficiency. Such deficits represent hidden dangers in the curriculum for children with SLI as they can have widespread effects on educational activities. Thus, any reliance on the uninformative SAT results is not desirable as the results are not sensitive to the sorts of problems children with SLI have. This point needs to be made again and again as SATs may well assume great educational importance as time goes by. There is no doubt that children with SLI need continual, specialised support given the variation in performance seen in this study and others. In addition, it is necessary to ensure that children with SLI have access to the curriculum and that they have varied and broad curricular opportunities. Future research on the curricular opportunities experienced by children with SLI attending language units is very much needed in the light of the recent developments in education and the implementation of the National Curriculum in the United Kingdom.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This stud was made possible by a grant (number R000232832) from the Economic and Social Research Council {ESRC) to the first and second authors. The authors wish to thank Melanie Kuhn for her help with some of the data collection.

APPENDIX I: COUNT EFFICIENCY TASK This task was developed from work by Case, Kurland and Goldberg (1982). It involved a measure of the combination of manual dexterity with counting. Full details are given below. The children are presented with a series of cards, each card containing 11 small circular stick-on circles, 14 mm in diameter, of which varying numbers were either green or yellow. The cards were marked by letter for identification on the reverse side. Numbers should not be used because the child may associate them with the answer. There were three practice cards with four, three and five green circles followed by eight test cards with quantities from six to nine, in random order.

Practice 1 Present card A face up on the table. Look at this card. Can you see the green dots? I should like you to count them. Touch each green dot as you count it. Only count the green dots. Like this. [Demonstrate by counting and touching each green dot.] Now you try Give praise or repeat until correct.

Practice 2 Present cards B and C, in turn, face down so the dots are hidden. Now do the same with this card. Turn it over and count the green dots when I say ‘go’. I’m going to time you to see how fast you are. Be as quick as you can but not so fast that you get it wrong. Assist until correct answers are given and correct procedure used Present cards D through to K, recording the time taken by the child and the nature of any errors.

Instructions 1. Provide a stop watch accurate to one-hundredth of a second. Prepare answer sheets as set out below. 2. Seat the child at a desk and a little distance from it so that there is freedom of movement for the arms. 3. The cards should be placed on the table so that one edge protrudes and can be easily grasped by the child. 4. The stop watch and its use for timing should be demonstrated before the test commences. 5 . The time taken by the child from the word ‘go’ to the instant of both touching and saying the number of the last circle should be noted. 6. In the event of the child counting incorrectly, terminal intonation indicates when the child considers that the task is complete. 7. Errors should be noted and fall into four categories: (i) partition error when the child lost his place, missed or double counted some dots; (ii) number string error in the counting sequence; (iii) coordination error illustrated by a discrepancy between hand and mouth; (iv) any other - note type.

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8. Scoring was examined on two levels, the first being a simple count of errors and type; the second

was based on the derivation of means and standard deviations for the time taken by each group of children. Practice cards were not counted.

Answer Sheet Name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

Time: Error: Comment:

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Received January 1992; revised version accepted June 1992.