Phonological deficits in French speaking children with SLI

Background: This study investigated the phonological disorders of Frenchspeaking
children with specific language impairment (SLI) in production.
Aims: The main goal was to confirm whether children with SLI have limitations
in phonological ability as compared with normally developing children matched
by mean length of utterance (MLU) and phonemic inventory size. A number of
researchers have obtained findings pointing in this direction, but the
conclusions have never been tested on French-speaking children. The second
goal was to find out whether characteristic features of the French language are
reflected in the nature of the children’s phonological disorder.
Methods & Procedures: The spontaneous language of 16 children with SLI and 16
control children matched on MLU and phonemic inventory size (normal
language development group) were analysed using different measures bearing
on utterances, words, syllables and phonemes. In both SLI and NLD groups,
the children were distributed into two different subgroups based on their MLU,
with controlled phonemic inventory size.
Outcomes & Results: The results supported a specific limitation in the phonological
abilities of French children with SLI, as has already been demonstrated
for English, Hebrew, Italian and Spanish-Catalan. However, two unexpected
results were also obtained. First, a significant difference between children with
SLI and control children could only be found for older children (MLU.3), not
for younger children with MLU,3. This was true for all measures.
Conclusions: This finding highlights the importance of having a developmental
perspective and needs to be confirmed through a longitudinal study. Second,
deficits were much more significant at the phoneme level than at the syllable
level. This may be explained by the fact that the pronunciation of syllables in
French is very homogenous, making them easier to segment.