Significant variation exists in how native speakers respond to word association tasks and challenges the usage of nativelikeness as a benchmark to gauge second language (L2) performance. However, the influence of word class and trials of elicitation is not sufficiently addressed in previous work. With controlled stimuli from multiple word classes,…

Sixteen children (17 age mates, 17 vocabulary mates) with specific language impairment (SLI) participated in two studies. In the first, they named fantasy objects. All groups coined novel noun-noun compounds on a majority of trials but only the SLI group had difficulty ordering the nouns as dictated by semantic context. In the second study, the…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to examine the accuracy, latency, and errors of noun (object) and verb (action) naming in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) and to determine whether children with SLI have a particularly large noun-verb performance gap. Method: Children with SLI, age-matched peers (AM), and…