Mazes in Swedish pre-school children with specific language impairment

The present investigation addresses mazes in Swedish pre-school children with specific language impairment (SLI). Spontaneous speech samples from 10 Swedish children were collected and analysed with respect to amount of mazes and their distributional patterns. The subjects consisted of five children with SLI and five MLU (mean length of utterance) matched controls with normal grammatical development but with a phonological impairment. Mazes were classified as pauses, repetitions and revisions. The children with SLI were found to have significantly more mazes, in particular repetitions and pauses, than the controls. The repetitions were significantly more often of part-word length in the children with SLI compared to the control group. Finally the repetitions of the children with SLI tended to affect lexical and function words equally, whereas they affected mainly function words in the controls. The results imply that an analysis of mazes could supplement traditional language testing of children with SLI, and increase our understanding of their speech processing.