Morpheme Use in Late Talkers at Age 5

It has been widely observed that some children struggle to acquire language. Of particular\ud interest to the current study is the subset of children who, although developmentally typical in\ud every other domain, fail to begin talking at the expected age and are slow to acquire words.\ud These children, termed "late talkers" (Rescorla, 2000), were previously thought to 'catch up' to\ud their non-delayed peers. However, more recent evidence suggests that late talkers show mild but\ud consistent language weakness through late adolescence, long after they have acquired vocabulary\ud and grammar. The present study fills a gap in the literature on these late talkers' developmental\ud trajectory by examining morphological development at age 5 in a group of late talkers identified\ud at 24 to 31 months of age. We found that late talkers and typically developing children showed\ud no significant differences in morphological mastery at age 5, despite highly significant\ud differences in MLU and IPSyn performance. This suggests that late talkers' language difficulties\ud at age 5 may specifically concern issues of sentence structure and complex language use, which\ud continue to manifest in higher-order language differences through adolescence. These findings\ud are discussed within Rescorla' s larger body of research, and suggestions for future research and\ud clinical intervention are provided