Referring expressions and structural language abilities in children with Specific Language Impairment: A pragmatic tolerance account

Specific language impairment (SLI) has traditionally been characterised as a deficit of structural language (specifically grammar), with relative strengths in pragmatics. In this study, comprehensive assessment of production, comprehension and metalinguistic judgment of referring expressions reveals that children with SLI have weaknesses in both structural and pragmatic language skills relative to age-matched peers. Correlational analyses highlight a relationship between their performance on the experimental tasks and their structural language ability. Despite their poor performance on the production and comprehension tasks, children with SLI were able to recognise pragmatically under-informative reference relative to other types of utterance, though imposed a less severe penalty on such expressions than their typically-developing peers; a pattern which supports the pragmatic tolerance account. Our novel methodology (which probes structural abilities from both the speaker’s and hearer’s perspectives as well as metalinguistic and pragmatic skills in the same sample) challenges the assumption that pragmatic errors stem from deficits in social cognition and instead supports recent findings suggesting that when the impact of structural language is isolated, pragmatic deficits may be resolved.