Three phonological theories at test about language impairment in French-speaking children

This study investigates the phonological expressive disorders of French-speaking children with SLI. The goal is to confirm that children with SLI have limitations in phonological ability, and to find out whether the characteristics of the French language are reflected in the nature of the children's phonological disorder. The spontaneous language of 16 children with SLI and of 16 control children matched on MLU and phonemic inventory size was analysed. 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. First, 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. Second, deficits were much more important at the phoneme level than at the syllable level