Maternal speech to their offspring: SLI children and their younger siblings

Differences have been found in some of the characteristics of maternal speech to SLI children when compared to maternal speech directed to normal language learning control children. In the present study comparisons within families were made between maternal speech to SLI children and to their normal language learning siblings of the same language stage. It was found that SLI children received less Directives than the younger normal siblings. In addition, it was found that the SLI children received more utterances with Approvals and a higher proportion of Teaching questions than the siblings. These results are discussed from a methodological point of view as well as within the context of bidirectional influences of conversational interaction in language learning.