Prelinguistic behaviors of children with specific language impairment: An analysis of home videos made in infancy

The purpose of this study was to determine whether there are differences in the prelinguistic behaviors used by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and typically developing children during the first year of life. Prelinguistic behaviors with established links to language including vocalizations, gestures, and facial affect, were examined retrospectively through the use of pre-made home videos made when the children were six to 12 months of age. The prelinguistic behaviors of five infants who were later diagnosed with SLI were compared to five typically developing children.;The most pivotal finding was that the two groups differed in their rate of gesture use at the 10--12 month age range, with the typically developing children using significantly more gestures than the SLI group. The typically developing children showed a steady increase in rate of gesture use across the 6--12 month age range. However, the rate of gesture use in the SLI group did not steadily increase but actually dropped at the 10--12 month range. At the point right before first words typically emerge, the SLI group had a rate of gesture use that was approximately 10% of the rate used by the typically developing children. In addition, the typically developing children had a higher rate of use for every gesture type.;The SLI group tended to babble less than the typically developing group at the 8--9 and 10--12 month age ranges. As was the case with gesture use, a very different pattern of canonical babbling was demonstrated by the two groups. The SLI groups' proportion of vocalizations that were canonical babbling barely increased across the 6--12 month age range; however, the typically developing groups' proportion of vocalizations that were canonical babbling steadily increased. No differences were noted in the two groups' use of affective expression. Both groups showed a similar rate of neutral affect. Taken together, findings suggest a very different prelinguistic profile of children with SLI than of typically developing children.