Publications
Publication details [#54596]
Wilbur, Ronnie and Robert Kurzban. 2011. The development of conversational competence in children with Specific Language Impairment. In Meibauer, Jörg and Markus Steinbach, eds. Experimental Pragmatics/Semantics. (Linguistik Aktuell / Linguistics Today 175). John Benjamins.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
Two adult raters viewed videotapes of children with and without SLI in spontaneous conversations. Raters identified violations of conversational rules and assigned each to a category based on a system developed by Bishop and Adams (1989). Children with SLI produced significantly more violations than their typical peers. All but two of the violations were analyzed as falling under the Gricean maxims of relation and quantity, consistent with results of earlier studies of younger, typically-developing children. These findings confirm that children with SLI exhibit lower pragmatic competence than their typically developing peers, inviting further study.