'SLI', a generic category of language impairment that emerges from specific differences: a case study of two individual linguistic profiles.

This paper looks at data taken from two school-aged children labelled as 'SLI' and examines their individual linguistic profiles both at the outset of a specific therapy intervention and approximately 1 year later. The study sought to assess their language abilities within a conversational context and to assess the efficacy of a particular area of their therapy programme. Differences in the two children's individual LARSP profiles raised questions relating to (a) the overall usefulness of 'SLI' as a diagnostic category of disorder, and (b) the need for greater use of detailed syntactic analysis by Speech Language Pathologists in both diagnostics and in implementing therapy programmes.