Auditory lexical decisions of children with specific language impairment.

To determine whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) take longer than age peers to recognize sequences of sounds that represent words in their lexicon, we compared auditory lexical decision times of children with SLI to those of typically developing age peers. Children with SLI were significantly slower than peers, but speed of word recognition was not correlated with measures of language comprehension for children with SLI. Furthermore, time to detect an auditory signal and initiate a vocal response did not account for the differences between groups. Possible interpretations of the results are discussed with two explanations-differences between groups in task-related factors that stressed processing capacity or in the nature of phonetic/phonological representations-seeming more likely than others.