Sentence recast use by parents of children with typical language and children with specific language impairment

Many early studies failed to find differences in the language input of parents to children with specific language impairments (SLI) when compared to the input provided for MLU-matched children with typical language (TL). More recent investigations have revealed significant differences in the frequency of sentence recasts provided to young children. Specifically, parents of children with SLI have been shown to produce fewer recasts than do parents of younger children with TL. Because recasts have been shown to facilitate morphosyntactic development, these findings have important assessment and treatment implications. The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend these recent findings. The sentence recast usage of the parents of 10 children with SLI was compared with the recast usage of parents of 10 younger children with TL at two points in time. This strategy enabled us to examine specific hypotheses about the quantity of recasts used by parents and the changes in patterns of use over time. The results failed to confirm recent findings; there were no differences between groups at either time. We interpret this to suggest that parents of children with SLI may not differ substantially from parents of children with TL in recast usage, at least in the early preschool years when the age gap separating children with SLI and language-matched children with TL is not great. Nevertheless, to benefit from their facilitative properties, children with SLI seem to need recasts that are more frequent or more focused on specific targets than are typically available in their environments.