Learning past tense morphology with specific language impairment: a case study

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a child with specific language impairment who usually omitted the regular past inflection in obligatory contexts yet occasionally over-regularized the past (e.g. *blowed). A treatment approach was employed that permitted a test of one current account of this paradoxical pattern, the filled paradigm' hypothesis. The child's gains over the treatment period did not conform to the predictions of the hypothesis, but rather suggested the possibility that her use of the past tense inflection was related to the phonological properties of the verb stem.

Morphosyntax Production of Preschool Children With Hearing Loss: An Evaluation of the Extended Optional Infinitive and Surface Accounts

“…Empirical support for the extended optional infinitive theoretical approach abounds. Many research groups have reported that tense marking represents a prolonged course of development for children with SLI, wherein children with SLI never fully attain the tense-marking accuracy of their peers with typical language (Bishop, 1994;Eyer & Leonard, 1994;Fletcher & Peters, 1984;Leonard, Caselli, Bortolini, McGregor, & Sabbadini, 1992;Marchman, Wulfeck, & Weismer, 1999;Rice et al, 1995;Rice, Wexler, & Hershberger, 1998).…”

The Potential of Past Tense Marking in Oral Reading as a Clinical Marker of Specific Language Impairment in School-Age Children

“…For preschool children, finiteness marking in spoken language has long shown promise as a clinical marker for SLI (Bedore & Leonard, 1998;Rice & Wexler, 1996;Tager-Flusberg & Cooper, 1999). Finiteness marking, or specification of grammatical tense, has an unusually protracted course of development for children with SLI (Bishop, 1994;Eyer & Leonard, 1994;Fletcher & Peters, 1984;Leonard, Caselli, Bortolini, McGregor, & Sabbadini, 1992;Marchman, Wulfeck, & Weismer, 1999;Rice, Wexler, & Cleave, 1995;Rice, Wexler, & Hershberger, 1998). As a group, children with SLI inconsistently omit finite markers in spontaneous language and in elicited tasks through the age of 8 years; these omissions for peers with TL are nearly nonexistent by the age of 5 years (Rice et al, 1998;Weiler, 2016).…”

Production and Processing of Subject–Verb Agreement in Monolingual Dutch Children With Specific Language Impairment

“…Other studies on English past tense inflection show that the quality of the stem-final consonant to which the suffix attaches is also important. For instance, children with SLI inflect verbs ending in nonobstruents (e.g., rolled) more often than verbs ending in obstruents (e.g., walked; Eyer & Leonard, 1994;Johnson & Morris, 2007;Marchman, Wulfeck, & Weismer, 1999;Oetting & Horohov, 1997). In other relevant studies, researchers looked at phonotactic probability.…”