Abstract
This paper reports on a study of fifteen Japanese preschool children with specific language impairment (JSLI) regarding the syntactical and phonological processing abilities which many studies have pointed out as the core of deficits in English-speaking children with SLI. The JSLI children had lower scores on a syntactic test than the CA (chronological age)-matched controls, with lower scores more prominent in production and in younger children (five-year-olds compared to six-year-olds). The five-year-old JSLI children also performed poorly on almost all types of sentence reproduction whereas the six-year-olds performed poorly on only on passive and causative constructions. Phonological short-term memory, which was assessed by an obsolete word repetition task, was also significantly poorer in the five-year-old JSLI children relative to the CA-matched controls, but not in the six-year-old JSLI children. Thus we found a developmental resolution in syntax and phonological processing which has not been reported in other languages. We also found a qualitative similarity of the language profile of the JSLI children compared to the ELA (expressive language age)-matched controls on all tasks. The crosslinguistic similarities and differences observed in the language characteristics of JSLI children are discussed.
