We analyzed whether Spanish-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment
(SLI) showed deficits in lexical-semantic processing/organization, and whether
these lexical measures correlated with standardized measures of language
abilities. Fourteen children with Typical Language Development (TLD) and 16
age-matched children with SLI (8;0–9;11 years) participated. In a
Lexical Decision (LD) task with implicit semantic priming, children judged
whether a given speech pair contained two words (semantically related/unrelated)
or a word-pseudoword. Children received a comprehensive language and reading
test battery. Children with TLD exhibited significant semantic priming; they
were faster for semantically related word pairs than for unrelated
(p < .001) and than for word-pseudoword pairs
(p < .0002). The group with SLI did not exhibit
significant semantic priming, despite showing more variability. Children with
SLI made significantly slower LDs [F(1, 26) = 4.61,
p < .05, partial η2
= .15] and more errors [F(1, 26) = 4.16,
p < .05, partial η2
= .13] than children with TLD. Mean response time across all LD
conditions and the receptive vocabulary (PPVT-III) were significantly negativity
correlated for children with SLI (r =
–.71, p = .004). Children with SLI,
especially those with the poorest language scores, showed a semantic-lexical
deficit and a weakness in lexical-semantic association networks. Their
performance on the LD task was significantly slower and poorer than for children
with TLD. Increasing a child’s vocabulary may benefit lexical
access.