Abstract

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show an alteration in the processing of subordination. It is interesting to examine here the increase in these structures and the number of failures produced by these children as they grow up, with respect to their peers with TD. To do observe this, a longitudinal, descriptive-comparative study was applied to 50 students -25 SLI, 25 TD- who were asked to tell three stories. The corpus was collected at three different times during their schooling distributed over two years (five, six and seven years old). In the analysis, two indices were applied: that of subordination productivity and that of interclausal deviations in subordination. Moreover, different types of interclausal deviations were identified, including substitution, incorporation, elision, and disagreement. The results have allowed us to observe that, ontogenetically, the SLI group increases the use of subordination and interclausal deviations with respect to their TD peers.