GRAMMATICAL AND NARRATIVE PERFORMANCE IN CHILDREN WITH SPECIFIC LANGUAGE DISORDER

This study focuses on the grammatical and narrative performance of children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI). Sixty native Spanish-speaking children were grouped as follows: SLI group (n= 20, mean age= 6.6 years), chronological-age control group (typical language development children n= 20), and MLU control group (typical language development children paired by Mean Length Utterance, n= 20). All children were asked to listen and retell three narratives, as well as to answer narrative-related questions. Retold stories were analyzed considering grammatical features (complexity and grammaticality in sentences), and discursive features (structure and semantic relations). Results show that SLI group performs similarly to MLU control group when observing sentence grammaticality and narrative comprehension. When analyzing grammatical complexity and narrativevproduction, SLI performance is statistically similar to both control groups. Results suggest that SLI children's ungrammatical sentences and narrative comprehension are the most troublesome domains in Grammar and Discourse, respectively.