Defining SLI: A Linguistic Perspective
Jill de Villiers · Psychology Press eBooks · 2003
Each of these is reflected in the work reported in this volume. This chapter reviews some of the various linguistic proposals concerning the fundamental nature of SLI. Linguistic theory and work on language development pathology can work together in several important ways. Linguistics prom-ises the best current analysis of the categories and principles of importance in language, which shift every decade or so to reflect the newest insights, and, we can only hope, retain the old ones. Work on child language pathology must keep abreast of these discoveries because they hold the prospect of illuminating puzzling co-occurrences of symptoms, or dissociations among parts of language that may seem superficially connected. These patterns, and the path and course of development over time, can in turn feed linguistic theory with significant empirical data to allow choice among competing theoretical analyses. Several chapters in this volume reflect this symbiosis, and serve as points of reflection in this chapter.