Abstract
The sentence comprehension strategies used by children with specific language impairments (SLI) were examined within the framework of the Competition Model (Bates and MacWhinney, 1989). The experiment was a replication of Kail and Charvillat'experiment (1988) designed to investigate the use of different morphosyntactic cues (i.e. word order, clitic pronoun, verbal agreement) in sentence comprehension by children (4;6 – 6;6) with normal language development. They found that French speaking children used mainly information on word order with a lesser reliance on the other cues (word order > clitic pronoun > verbal agreement). In the present study, the same experiment was replicated with 25 French speaking children with SLI. The results suggested that children with SLI had specific difficulties in processing clitic pronouns, while verbal agreement could be processed (word order > verbal agreement > clitic pronoun). This pattern seems to be a specific strategy and not simply a delayed profile. In addition, our results were compatible with a theoretical account in terms of limitation in processing capacities.
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