Production and perception of metrical patterns in Swedish children with language impairment

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between perception and production of metrical patterns in Swedish children with language impairment (LI), in order to add to the knowledge on underlying explanations of LI. A further aim was to explore whether omissions are mainly related to prosodic aspects or to linguistic function. Children with LI omitted significantly more unstressed syllables than did children with typical language development. Exploration of the relationship between perception and production of phrasal stress patterns demonstrated that children with LI might be divided into three subgroups: Group a: children who perform better on perception than production; Group b: children who perform better on production than perception; and Group c: children with rather poor results on both perception and production.