Perception of fully grammatical and anomalous sentences by seven year old males with normal or delayed language development

The purpose of this study was to compare the performances of seven year old male children with delayed language skills and male children of the same age with normal language skills on a sentence repetition task.

The subjects were asked to repeat fully grammatical sentences, anomalous sentences and scrambled word strings presented in a +5dB signal to noise ratio.

Statistical analysis of the data indicated that: (1) the children with normal language skills performed significantly better on repetition of fully grammatical and anomalous sentences than the children with delayed language skills; (2) both groups of subjects performed better on the repetition of fully grammatical than anomalous sentences and least accurately on scrambled strings; (3) both groups of subjects performed equally poor on the repetition of scrambled strings. On the basis of these results, fully grammatical sentences were not good predictors of language skill. However, repetition of anomalous sentences in noise appeared to be a good indicator of language skill.