Syntactic bootstrapping in children with specific language impairment.

Syntactic bootstrapping was assessed in six children with normally developing language (NL) and six children with specific language impairment (SLI), ages 6 and 8, respectively. Children earned normal range non-verbal IQs and were matched by raw scores on a test of sentence comprehension. They were asked to listen to sentences containing novel verbs and to act out the meanings with toys. The SLI children earned reliably lower scores, but their errors suggested processing limitations rather than deficits in syntactic representation.