Published Paper


Word Formation Deficits in Children with Specific Language Impairment

Etim, Victoria Enefiok

Page: 634-642
Published on: 2024 June

Abstract

The study on the word formation deficits in children with specific language impairment (SLI) was aimed at identifying children with specific language impairment who are affected in the process of word formation. It is very common to have children with specific language impairment being confronted with the challenge of word formation. This study therefore, sets out to investigate the deficits in simple past inflections and plural morphemes as they are manifested in children with specific language impairment (CWSLI) in Hillcrest Junior Special Schoo, Calabar, Cross River Sate, Nigeria. It also sought to examine the severity of the disorders in order to provide data as the first step towards a critical intervention. The study involved 20 CWSLI between the ages of 5 and 17 years from Hillcrest Junior special school in Calabar. 10 boys and 10 girls. Validated Word Structure (WS) assessment comprising 10 pictures and 10 sentences completion tasks as well as reliability test re-test of mean length of utterance (MLU) were used to collect data for the study. The children were made to repeat the story contained in a passage of 100 utterances which were recorded and eventually transcribed for analysis using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcript (SALT) Software. The theory of word-based model was adopted for the descriptive analysis. From the findings, the study confirmed that there is alarming deficits of word formation in CWSLI within the study area. It was revealed that between 65% and 70% of errors were found in the utterances of each of the 20 subjects examined. It also revealed that the value of mean length of utterance in all the subjects was below 5.0. It was therefore recommended that parents, teachers and caregivers should pay attention to the language development of their wards so as to observe any deviation during the development. Also, recommended that a state/nation-wide survey should be carried out to have national statistics of CWSLI with word formation deficits and develop intervention strategies for effective therapy to remediate the disorder.

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