The Grammatical Deficits of Persian-Speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

Background: Specific language impairment (SLI) is one of the most common disorders of language development in children, which has been less addressed in Persian studies. The aim of this study was to evaluate the grammatical characteristics of Persian-speaking children with SLI using Photographic Expressive Persian Grammar Test (PEGT). Methods: This case-control, cross-sectional study was conducted on 16 children with SLI and 16 normal children aged 4-6 years, who were monolingual Persian speakers. The subjects in both groups were age- and gender-matched. After selecting each participant, PEGT was administered and results were recorded in an answer sheet and analyzed. To analyze the data, the mean total scores of the test and mean scores related to each syntactic structure of the PEGT were compared between the two groups using Mann–Whitney test. Results: In this study, a significant difference was observed in mean total scores of the test between the studied groups. In detail, the mean score of the normal group was significantly higher as compared with the SLI group (P<0.05). Moreover, a significant difference was found between the groups regarding each of the evaluated syntactic structures (P<0.05). Conclusion: According to the results of the present study, children with SLI had weaker performance as compared with their normally developing age-matched peers in evaluated morphosyntactic structures.

Keywords

• Specific language impairment
• Test
• Persian
• Children