Eighteen children with specific language impairment (SLI), from 6 to 8 years of age, werecompared with 9 control children matched on age and nonverbal ability (CA controls) and with 9younger control children of comparable language level (LA controls). Half of the SLI group wererated on a teacher checklist as having pragmatic difficulties: these were referred to as thepragmatic language impairment (PLI) group; the remainder were the typical (SLI-T) group.Children's responses to adult soliciting utterances were compared. All children usuallyresponded to conversational solicitations, but children in the PLI group were more likely thancontrol children to give no response, and they also made very little use of nonverbal responses,such as nodding. Nonverbal responding was closely related to the quality of children'sresponses. Children who failed to use nonverbal responses also had a relatively high level ofpragmatically inappropriate responses that were not readily accounted for in terms of limitedgrammar or vocabulary. This study lends support to the notion that there is a subset of thelanguage-impaired population who have broader communicative impairments, extending beyondbasic difficulties in mastering language form, reflecting difficulty in responding to andexpressing communicative intents. The analytic methods developed for this project have promisefor the study of pragmatic difficulties in other clinical groups.