Abstract :
[en] This study investigated the phonological expressive disorders of Frenchspeaking
children with SLI. The main goal of this paper was to confirm whether
children with SLI have limitations in phonological ability even when they are
compared with normally-developing children matched by MLU and phonemic
inventory size. This was demonstrated by Bortoloni and Leonard (2000), Orsolini et
coll. (2001), and Aguilar-Mediavilla et coll. (2002), which obtained the most detailed
results in this direction, but it was never tested in French language. The second goal
of the paper is to find out whether the characteristics of the French language are
reflected in the nature of the children’s phonological disorder. In order to test this, the
spontaneous language of 16 children with SLI and of 16 control children matched on
MLU and phonemic inventory size (NLD group) was analysed using different
measures bearing on utterances, words, syllables, or phonemes. In both SLI and NLD
groups, the children were distributed in two different subgroups, on the basis of their
MLU and phonemic inventory size. The results supported a specific limitation in the
phonological abilities of French children with SLI, as was already demonstrated for
English, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish-Catalan. However, two unexpected results were
also obtained. Firstly, a significant difference between children with SLI and control
children could only be found for older children (MLU above 3), not for younger
children with MLU below 3. This was true for all measures. This finding stresses out
the importance of having a development perspective and has to be confirmed with
longitudinal design. Secondly, deficits were much more important at the phoneme
level than at the syllable level. This can be explained by the fact that the French
language has a very homogenous pronunciation of syllables, which makes them easier
to segment.
Publisher :
Union Nationale pour le Développement de la Recherche et de l'Evaluation en Orthophonie (UNADRIO), Paris, France