Subject descriptions, control groups, and research designs in published studies of language-impaired children.

We reviewed the 1983-1988 issues of six journals that frequently publish papers including specifically language-impaired (LI) subjects. A total of 92 research reports provided data for our review. The research reports included experimental studies, ex post facto studies, and intervention studies. These studies represent a broad spectrum of the theoretical and empirical foundations of knowledge regarding LI children. The analysis of the published research centered on subject descriptions and the use of control groups. A descriptive analysis of the data showed few consistent trends among the studies with respect to subject selection, subject description, and the number and types of control groups. We discuss the importance of more complete subject descriptions in studies of LI children as well as the importance of the choice of matching criteria for control groups in between-subjects designs.

Language-impaired children's awareness of inadequate messages.

Inasmuch as past research supports the notion that language-impaired children are deficient in their performance on some metalinguistic/metacommunicative tasks, we hypothesized an expected deficiency on a language awareness task requiring judgments of message adequacy. To test our hypothesis, we chose 45 subjects, 15 specific language-impaired school-age children with 15 age-mates and 15 younger controls. Our procedure involved two lifelike stories each depicting a speaker and a listener. Within the context of each story, the speaker makes a request. However, the speaker's message is too general. Therefore, the speaker's intention is not understood. Subjects were classified as speaker-blamers or listener-blamers on the basis of responses to examiner queries. Language-impaired and the younger normally developing children were predominantly listener-blamers, whereas age-mates were speaker-blamers. The results are discussed in terms of a cognitive framework for metalinguistic/metacommunicative problem solving. In addition, clinical implications are addressed.