The impact of lexical frequency on sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment

• Children with SLI show both sentence comprehension and lexical processing problems.
• We assess the impact of lexical frequency on their sentence comprehension performances.
• Sentence comprehension was more affected by lexical frequency in SLI than in controls.
• Similar impacts of grammar complexity and sentence length were observed in all groups.
• Lexical processing difficulties affect sentence comprehension performances in SLI.

Children with SLI generally exhibit poor sentence comprehension skills. We examined the specific impact of grammatical complexity and lexical frequency on comprehension performance, yielding contrasting results. The present study sheds new light on sentence comprehension in children with SLI by investigating a linguistic factor which has attracted little research interest: the impact of the lexical frequency of known words on sentence comprehension. We also examined the impact of grammatical complexity and sentence length by independently varying these two factors. Fifteen children with SLI, 15 age- and IQ-matched controls, and 15 controls matched on lexical and grammatical skills, performed sentence comprehension tasks in which three linguistic factors were manipulated: lexical frequency (sentences containing words of either low or high lexical frequency), grammatical complexity (sentence containing either a subject relative clause or an object relative clause) and sentence length (either short or long sentences). Results indicated that children with SLI performed more poorly overall compared to age- and IQ-matched children and to lexical and morphosyntactic age-matched children. However, their performance was not more affected by either sentence length or clause type than that of control children. Only lexical frequency affected sentence comprehension to a greater extent in children with SLI relative to the control groups, revealing that SLI children's sentence comprehension abilities are particularly affected by the presence of low-frequency but familiar words.