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Repair in speech and language therapy interaction: Investigating pragmatic language impairment of children

Department of Speech and Language Therapy, East Yorkshire Primary Care Trust, UK

Andrew John Merrison

Department of Language Studies andLinguistics, YorkStJohn College, UK

This paper examines the repair skills of three groups of 7 to 11-year old children: 1) children with Pragmatic Language Impairments (the PLIgroup); 2) children with Specific Language Impairments with no pragmatic difficulties (the SLI group); 3) children with normally developing communication skills (the mainstream group). The data comprise one-to-one interactions with a speech and language therapist, where the participants are engaged in a task devised to provide multiple opportunities for the initiation of repair The research also included a six-week period of therapy focusing on pragmatic skills for the children with PLI. Repair skills were compared pre-and post-intervention. Initially, both the mainstream and SLI groups achievedfar greater task success than the group with PLI, whose poor performance was largely attributable to their tendency not to initiate repair After the intervention period however, this group showed marked improvement (both in initiating repair and in task success). This reveals their potential to develop pragmatic skills that they have not spontaneously acquired if they are explicitly taught them.

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