The effect of pictured visual cues on elicited sentence imitation.

In one experiment language-normal 6 1/2-year-old and 4 1/2-year-old children (N = 68) were asked to imitate sentences with or without pictured visual cues. In a second experiment groups of language-disordered children (N = 43) also 4 1/2 and 6 1/2 years of age were asked to imitate sentences with and without pictured visual cues. In both experiments there was no significant difference in the syntactical and grammatical quality of elicited imitations between conditions. Older children performed better than young children in both experiments. It was concluded that pictured visual cues do not affect the syntactical and grammatical quality of language-normal and language-disordered children's elicited sentence imitations.