Persistent problems in SLI: which grammatical problems remain when children grow older?

Abstract

Grammatical problems are a hallmark of SLI: most children with SLI seem to have problems with grammatical rules like inflection, agreement or those involved in complex syntactic structures. While grammatical abilities have been studied extensively in younger children with SLI, fewer studies have considered what happens with their grammatical problems as children with SLI grow older. In this article, the literature on outcomes of SLI is reviewed, with special focus on the linguistic outcomes. The studies on adolescents/adults with SLI indicate that, besides problems in socio-emotional functioning and psychiatric wellbeing, language impairments are often persistent into adolescence. Studies on specific grammatical aspects indicate that the problems that characterize SLI in childhood are still present in adulthood, but performance seems to depend on the type of task and linguistic context. Different theoretical frameworks are evaluated with respect to their ability to explain these particular outcomes. The Vulnerable Markers Hypothesis is proposed as the framework that seems to explain the outcomes the best.