Kamhi A G
J Speech Hear Res. 1981 Sep;24(3):446-53. doi: 10.1044/jshr.2403.446.
This study was motivated in part by the claim that language-impaired children with normal nonverbal intelligence suffer from representational and symbolization deficits (Morehead & Ingram, 1973). The study also examined the developing concepts of class, number, and order in these children to evaluate the claim that their thinking and reasoning in the nonlinguistic domain were within normal limits. Subjects were language-impaired children and two groups of normally developing children, one matched for MA and the other for MLU to the language-imparied group. Each group consisted of ten children. Each child was administered six nonstandardized cognitive tasks from the Piagetian literature. These tasks were designed to assess developing nonlinguistic symbolic abilities and conceptual knowledge of class, number, and order relations. The language-impaired children consistently performed better than MLU-matched controls but more poorly than MA-matched peers. However, only one task--Haptic Recognition--uncovered a significant difference between the language-impaired and MA-matched groups. The difficulty that language-impaired children experienced on this task was taken as evidence that they had deficient nonlinguistic symbolic abilities. Some tentative conclusions are offered concerning the role representational abilities play in language development.
具有正常非语言智力的语言障碍儿童存在表征和符号化缺陷（莫尔黑德和英格拉姆，1973）。该研究还考察了这些儿童在类别、数量和顺序方面逐渐发展的概念，以评估他们在非语言领域的思维和推理处于正常范围这一观点。研究对象是语言障碍儿童以及两组发育正常的儿童，一组在心理年龄上与语言障碍组匹配，另一组在平均语句长度上与语言障碍组匹配。每组由十名儿童组成。每个儿童都接受了来自皮亚杰文献的六项非标准化认知任务。这些任务旨在评估逐渐发展的非语言符号能力以及对类别、数量和顺序关系的概念性知识。语言障碍儿童的表现始终优于在平均语句长度上与之匹配的对照组，但比在心理年龄上与之匹配的同龄人差。然而，只有一项任务——触觉识别——揭示了语言障碍组与在心理年龄上与之匹配的组之间的显著差异。语言障碍儿童在这项任务上遇到的困难被视为他们非语言符号能力存在缺陷的证据。关于表征能力在语言发展中所起的作用，本文提出了一些初步结论。
