Noun case suffix use by children with specific language impairment: An examination of Finnish

Leonard, Laurence B.; Kunnari, Sari; Savinainen-Makkonen, Tuula; Tolonen, Anna-Kaisa; Mäkinen, Leena; Luotonen, Mirja; Leinonen, Eeva

doi:10.1017/s0142716412000598

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Children with SLI made inflection errors, but surprisingly to quite a small extent. However, previous research has shown that grammatical difficulties are evident in verb and noun inflections in Finnish children with SLI when examined by specific probe tasks (Kunnari et al, 2011;Leonard et al, 2012). In this study, the stories of children with SLI were short.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Linguistic and pragmatic aspects of narration in Finnish typically developing children and children with specific language impairment

Mäkinen

Loukusa

Laukkanen

et al. 2014

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

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This study investigates narratives of Finnish children with specific language impairment (SLI) from linguistic and pragmatic perspectives, in order to get a comprehensive overview of these children's narrative abilities. Nineteen children with SLI (mean age 6;1 years) and 19 typically developing age-matched children participated in the study. Their picture-elicited narrations were analysed for linguistic productivity and complexity, grammatical and referential accuracy, event content, the use of mental state expressions and narrative comprehension. Children with SLI showed difficulties in every aspect of narration in comparison to their peers. Only one measure of productivity, the number of communication units, did not reach statistical significance. Not only was linguistic structure fragile but also pragmatic aspects of storytelling (referencing, event content, mental state expressions and inferencing) were demanding for children with SLI. Results suggest that pragmatic aspects of narration should be taken into account more often when assessing narrative abilities of children with SLI.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Linguistic and pragmatic aspects of narration in Finnish typically developing children and children with specific language impairment

Mäkinen

Loukusa

Laukkanen

et al. 2014

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

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“…It is interesting to note that accusative case is relatively difficult for children with DLD acquiring Finnish, another agglutinating language (Leonard et al . 2014). As in Turkish, the appearance or absence of this suffix in Finnish depends on the context.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One factor that emerges from these studies is these children's difficulty mastering the morphophonological changes that are often required when a suffix must be added to the stem (Leonard et al . 2014). In language such as Finnish and Hungarian, these changes are relatively complex.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Production of noun suffixes by Turkish‐speaking children with developmental language disorder and their typically developing peers

Güven

Leonard

2020

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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Background: Turkish has a rich system of noun suffixes, and although its complex suffixation system may seem daunting, it can actually present a learning opportunity for children. Despite its unique features, Turkish has not been studied extensively, especially in the case of children with language deficits, such as developmental language disorder (DLD). Most of the extant studies are focused on bilingual children, and the results are somewhat mixed. Aims: To focus on the noun morphology system of Turkish-speaking preschoolers with DLD and compare their use with that of two groups of typically developing (TD) children. Moreover, to investigate the nature of their noun suffix errors in detail. Methods & Procedures:We report data from a total of 80 monolingual children, 40 children with DLD (age range = 4;0-7;10), 20 TD age-matched children (4;0-7;3) and 20 younger mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched children (2;0-4;3). The data for this study came from language samples obtained from children in individual clinical assessment sessions.Outcomes & Results: The children with DLD made less use of noun suffixes than both the younger and the age-matched TD children. The use of the unmarked (nominative case) form in place of an overt suffix was the most likely error by all groups. Suffix-change alternations required beyond vowel harmony seemed to pose real problems for these children.Conclusions & Implications: These results suggest that even when a language appears to provide significant advantages for the learning of noun morphology, children with DLD do not succeed in closing the gap. Certain factors such as morphophonological changes beyond vowel harmony, multiple allomorphs for the same suffix type and accusative suffixes that are not uniformly applied in the adult input were found to be significant predictors of the DLD group's difficulty with noun suffixes. Because these same factors can serve as characteristics of other languages, a child's difficulties might seem to be language specific (e.g., a particular allomorph in the language), but may actually be based on a broader difficulty (e.g., dealing with multiple allomorphs for the same suffix). Accordingly, factors that transcend a single language should be considered during clinical assessment and therapy. What are some of the clinical applications of this study?r For clinicians who work with Turkish-speaking children with DLD, priority should be given to morphophonology. These children would benefit from treatment that focuses on how to attach different allomorphs to different open-class words. Because factors such as morphophonological complexity operate in other languages, the findings have broader clinical implications. In particular, regardless of the target language, clinicians should consider the possibility that these broader factors, rather than language-specific details, are the basis for a child's difficulty.

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“…For example, in Finnish, children with DLD often use the nominative case (the most frequently occurring case in the language) in place of the genitive, partitive and accusative cases (Leonard et al . ). Case difficulties can also be seen in Japanese (Murao et al .…”

Section: Factor 2: Case Confusionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Five overarching factors central to grammatical learning and treatment in children with developmental language disorder

Leonard

Kueser

2019

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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Background During grammatical treatment of children with developmental language disorder (DLD), it is natural for therapists to focus on the grammatical details of the target language that give the children special difficulty. However, along with the language‐specific features of the target (e.g., for English, add –s to verbs in present tense, third‐person singular contexts), there are overarching factors that operate to render the children's learning task more, or less, challenging, depending on the particular target. Aims To identify five such factors that can play a role in the grammatical learning of children with DLD. We use English as our example language and provide supporting evidence from a variety of other languages. Main Contribution We show that the relative degree of English‐speaking children's difficulty with particular grammatical details can be affected by the extent to which these details involve: (1) bare stems; (2) opportunities for grammatical case confusion; (3) prosodic challenges; (4) grammatical and lexical aspect; and (5) deviations from canonical word order. Conclusions During treatment, therapists will want to consider not only the English‐specific features of grammatical targets but also how these more general factors can be taken into account to increase the children's success.

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Noun case suffix use by children with specific language impairment: An examination of Finnish

Cited by 12 publications

References 30 publications

Linguistic and pragmatic aspects of narration in Finnish typically developing children and children with specific language impairment

Linguistic and pragmatic aspects of narration in Finnish typically developing children and children with specific language impairment

Production of noun suffixes by Turkish‐speaking children with developmental language disorder and their typically developing peers

Five overarching factors central to grammatical learning and treatment in children with developmental language disorder

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