Difficulties with tense-related morphology may be compounded in children with SLI if they fail to make use of associations between the lexical aspect of verb predicates and the grammatical function of the accompanying inflections. The authors argue that the advantages of using these associations as a starting point in acquisition may be especially important in the case of -ed. Additional studies of children with SLI are clearly needed, including those that employ longitudinal, naturalistic data.
Among the grammatical limitations seen in English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a prolonged period of using articles (e.g., a, the) inconsistently. Most studies documenting this difficulty have focused on article omission and have not made the distinction between definite and indefinite article contexts. In this study, there were 36 participants: 12 5-year-olds with SLI, 12 typically-developing children matched for age, and 12 younger, typically-developing children matched with participants in the SLI group according to mean length of utterance. All 36 children participated in a task requiring indefinite article use, and a task requiring use of the definite article, in which the referent of the noun had already been established in the discourse. The children with SLI showed less use of definite articles in particular, relative to both groups of typically-developing children. Substitutions as well as omissions were seen. The findings suggest that the article limitations of the children with SLI were attributable in part to an incomplete understanding of how definite articles are to be used.
Potential phonological contributions to the inconsistent use of regular noun plural -s were examined in two groups of children who were inconsistent in their use of plural -s: 26 children with specific language impairment and 26 younger, typically developing children with comparable mean lengths of utterance. The children's degree of plural -s use in spontaneous speech was examined according to the stem-final phoneme type (vowel, consonant, or consonant cluster), and the type of context that immediately followed the obligatory context for -s in the child's utterance (vowel-initial word, consonant-initial word). Both groups of children had greater inflection accuracy when noun stems ended in a vowel as compared to a consonant or in a consonant cluster.Keywords expressive language, phonological factors, preschool-aged children, regular noun plural -s, specific language impairment (SLI)Many accounts of English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) center on these children's difficulties with grammatical morphemes that mark tense and agreement. Although these difficulties seem to represent the most serious grammatical morpheme problems in this clinical population, some English-speaking children with SLI also have considerable difficulty with regular noun plural -s (e.g., hat for hats, belt at UNIV NEBRASKA LIBRARIES on March 16, 2015 fla.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Children with specific language impairment (SLI) usually differ from younger peers in their use of grammatical morphemes pertaining to tense and agreement. The word-final consonant status of many of these morphemes has prompted researchers to verify that the children under study are capable of producing these consonants in monomorphemic words (e.g. hand, box). However, such a measure does not ensure that the children with SLI are capable of producing words of sufficient length to support grammatical morpheme use. To examine the possible influence of this factor, we employed Ingram's phonological mean length of utterance (PMLU) as the basis for matching a group of preschoolers with SLI and younger typically developing peers. The children's use of tense/agreement morphemes was then determined. The findings indicated that despite the comparable PMLUs of the two groups, the children with SLI were more limited in their use of tense/agreement morphology than the younger peers.
Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often have extraordinary difficulty in the use of tense and agreement morphemes. Because spontaneous speech samples may not provide a sufficient number of obligatory contexts for these morphemes, structured probe items are often employed. However, these usually emphasize actions that can be readily illustrated through drawings, which tend to have third person subjects. In this paper we describe a method that has been successful in creating obligatory contexts for a first person morpheme -auxiliary am -that heretofore has been assessed exclusively through spontaneous speech samples. Participants were 32 mainstream American English-speaking children comprising three diagnostic subgroups: children with SLI, typically developing age-matched peers, and younger typically developing peers matched for mean length of utterance (MLU). The children participated in a task in which they described their actions for an audience; these descriptions required the use of auxiliary am. The results revealed that the children with SLI used auxiliary am with significantly smaller percentages than both groups of typically developing children, a finding that is consistent with findings that employ other tense and agreement morphemes. Clinical applications of this method are discussed.
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