Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with specific language impairment

Abstract

Research on specific language impairment (SLI) has primarily focused on the acquisition of nouns and verbs. Less attention has been given to other content-word classes, such as adjectives and adverbs. This article investigates adjective production by 7- to 10-year-old Russian-speaking children with SLI and their typically developing (TD) peers and focuses on the production of antonymous adjectives and degree markers in an elicitation experiment. The results show that degree morphology is more impaired in SLI than antonymy. In antonym production, children with SLI were able to catch up with their TD peers by age 8. In the domain of degree, however, the SLI group lagged behind the TD controls across all ages studied. Error analysis indicates that language-impaired children have particular difficulty with agreement inflection and affixal negations. They also substitute adjectives with specific meanings by more general terms. The implications of this study for the morphological-richness hypothesis are discussed.

Infrequent word classes in the speech of two- to seven-year-old children with cochlear implants and their normally hearing peers: A longitudinal study of adjective use

“…Taking as a starting point the assumption that adjective production is a good indicator of a delay in the linguistic development [38,39], the present study set out to explore the development of adjective use in spontaneous speech of Dutchspeaking CI children compared to their NH peers. Adjective use was operationalized as overall token frequencies, lexical diversity, complexity of syntactic frames in which adjectives are used, as well as correctness of agreement inflection.…”

“…Naturalistic studies of spontaneous speech show that adjectives account for only about 5% of word tokens in child-directed speech [27,35]. Therefore, it is not surprising that adjective production was shown to be a good indicator of language proficiency [36] and language impairments [37][38][39].…”

Complexity markers in morphosyntactic productions in French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI)

“…Previous studies demonstrated that the production of adverbs and determiners is preserved in children with SLI (Moore & Johnston, 1993). A weakness with adjective production was observed in children with SLI as they tend to replace adjectives with specific meanings by more general terms (Tribushinina & Dubinkina 2012), but this weakness does not seem to affect their raw production frequency.…”

Bedeutung von Polysemie, Antonymie und Assoziationen im Spracherwerb – Zweisprachigkeit in der Sprachförderung und Sprachtherapie von sprachentwicklungsverzögerten und spracherwerbsgestörten Kindern im Grundschulalter

“…u. a. Tribushinina & Dubinkina 2012). Eine wesentliche Annahme in der der Forschungsdiskussion stellt dabei die Annahme von Clark (1973) dar, der zufolge sich der Antonymerwerb als gradueller Erwerb von Gegensätzen, das heißt im Zusammenhang mit spezifischen (gegensätzli-chen) semantischen Merkmalen vollzieht (vgl.…”