Connective ending awareness of early school-aged children at risk for specific language impairment

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to examine the connective ending awareness of early school-aged children who understood primary Korean sentence structure and continuously develop grammatical awareness. Also, this study compares the ability between children at risk for specific language impairment and typically developing children. Methods: Thirty-two 1st-3rd grade children in elementary school children participated in this study: 16 children at risk for specific language impairment (AR-SLI group) and 16 age- and gender-matched typically developing children (TD group). The connective ending awareness test consisted of four tasks (change, judgement, correction, word-order), and in each task the same number of coordinate and subordinate endings were assigned. The connective ending awareness test was analyzed by using a three-way mixed ANOVA according to the group, task type, and connective ending type. Also, the correlation among connective ending awareness, vocabulary, syntactic comprehension ability, and syntactic production ability were analyzed using a Pearson correlation coefficient. Results: It is showed that connective ending awareness has a significant main effect of groups, task types, and connective ending types; and that the AR-SLI group showed lower ability than the TD group. The connective ending awareness of the AR-SLI group was found to have a significant positive correlation with expressive vocabulary and syntactic production ability. Conclusion: The results of this study indicate that the AR-SLI group with delayed vocabulary, similar to SLI, showed difficulty in syntactic ability. In addition, the connective ending awareness test can be used as a tool to evaluate the syntactic abilities of school-aged children.