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BACKGROUND: The ability of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) to use and comprehend closed-class words. AIM: Acknowledging the increasing search for the characterization of linguistic performance of this population in different languages, as well as the findings of international literature that stress the difficulty of these children in using closed-class grammatical morphemes, the aim of this study was to analyze the performance of children with SLI in tests of production and comprehension of prepositions. The purpose of this research was also to compare the performance of these children to that of their typical language developing peers, in terms of the overall index of correct answers and the most frequent types of errors in both groups. METHOD: An objective test was developed in order to analyze production and comprehension of four types of prepositions that are used to establish the following semantic relations: with (company relation); by (way relation); in, on or at (place/position relations); and to (destination relation). This test was carried out with 19 SLI children and 29 typically developing children (CG--control group), one year younger than the research group. RESULTS: SLI children presented the same pattern of results, although delayed, of children in the CG in the comprehension test. In the task involving production, however, the performance of SLI children was quantitatively and qualitatively inferior to their typical developing controls. This performance was mainly characterized by the omission of prepositions. CONCLUSION: The findings corroborate the view that grammatical words constitute a challenge for SLI children, since they presented many errors that suggest difficulties in the domain of prepositions. The results also emphasized, for the SLI group, deficits in the expressive language.