Semantic representation and naming in children with specific language impairment.

Background: children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) show lexical deficits as the first noticeable sign of such disorder, characterized as difficulties in lexical access during naming and speech tests. Studies that compare picture naming and drawings seem perfect to clarify lexical deficits.

Aim: to compare the performance of children with normal language development (NLD) to that of children with SLI in naming, drawing and definition tasks, aiming to explore the the quality of semantic representation of the lexicon.

Method: Two groups were involved in this study: the Control Group (CG), with no language disorders, composed by 40 subjects, and the Research Group (RG), with 20 subjects, all diagnosed with SLI, aging from five to seven years. Tasks of naming, picture drawing and definition were performed, using 20 different pictures. In the naming task, the types of errors were analyzed and sorted as follows: semantic, phonological, none specified and others. The analysis of the drawing and definition tasks was based only on the correct answers, semantic and none specified errors.

Results: children of the RG presented a greater number of semantic errors in the picture naming task when compared to the CG. Besides that, definitions presented by the RG seemed more simple and incomplete even when the child was capable of naming the picture correctly. Drawings of correctly named objects were better than those that were named incorrectly.

Conclusions: it was possible to discriminate within SLI children those that present greater lexical deficits. It was also possible to explore the possible reasons for failures in naming tasks.