The Social Competence of Children Diagnosed With Specific Language Impairment

Traditional approaches to the study of social competence of children have not considered the full range of factors involved in judging a child’s social competence. The approaches have typically designed abstract measures of children’s social competence and used the measures to classify the children as socially competent or socially incompetent. Some researchers, for example, have used teachers’ and children’s judgments of a student’s likability as a sole indicator of that child’s social competence (e.g., Black & Hazen, 1990; Denham & Holt, 1993; Masters & Furman, 1981; Terry & Coie, 1991). Other researchers, with the aim of assessing the social abilities of children with communication problems, have asked the children to perform tasks that require social knowledge, such as solving problems requiring social information (e.g., Stevens & Bliss, 1995; Tur-Kaspa & Bryan, 1994). These approaches to determining children’s social competence fail to consider the multidimensional and socially situated nature of social understanding and performance.