The perfective past tense in Greek children with specific language impairment

The relationship between SLI in English and Modern Greek

“…The presence of such a rule is also supported psycholinguistically. Both TD children and children with SLI produce sigmatic responses for novel rhymes in elicited production tasks and present higher rates of overapplication of sigmatic responses in existing non-sigmatic verbs than vice versa (Stavrakaki & Clahsen 2009;Stavrakaki et al 2012). Children with SLI, however, rely to a lesser extent upon the sigmatic rule than TD children.…”

“…Children with SLI, however, rely to a lesser extent upon the sigmatic rule than TD children. This is evidenced by lower rates of overapplication of the sigmatic past tense in the nonsigmatic category, higher rates of non-sigmatic responses in the sigmatic categories, and lower rates of sigmatic responses for novel rhymes (Stavrakaki et al 2012).…”

“…For both TD children and children with SLI, the main error pattern is substitutions from more frequent categories (e.g., using suffixes from the neuter gender to mark masculine nouns, Mastropavlou 2003a,b;Stephany 1997). Stavrakaki, Koutsandreas and Clahsen (2012) examined the acquisition profile of children with SLI in the perfective past tense, used to denote events that were completed (perfective aspect) in the past. Although this domain presents multiple conjugational categories, it is possible to consider a fundamental distinction between verbs which require -among other features -the addition of an aspectual marker (-s-) to the verb stem to form the perfective past tense (henceforth: the sigmatic class, s: sigma) and verbs which do not require an aspectual marker (henceforth: the non-sigmatic class).…”

“…Figure 2 refers to the English past tense, based on the dichotomy between regular and irregular verbs. Figure 3 focuses on the 2nd person singular of the perfective past tense in Modern Greek, based on the distinction of the so-called sigmatic ('regular') and non-sigmatic ('irregular') categories (Stavrakaki & Clahsen 2009;Stavrakaki et al 2012). The formation of the perfective past tense in the sigmatic category involves, among other features, the addition of an aspectual marker -s-to the stem (s: sigma, in Modern Greek).…”

Epistemic uncertainty: Turkish children with specific language impairment and their comprehension of tense and aspect

“…Although researchers seem to agree that aspectual distinctions can be difficult for children with SLI to acquire (Penner et al 2003for German, Fletcher et al 2005 for Cantonese, Stuart and van der Lely 2015 for English, but see Stavrakaki et al 2012 for Greek), there is no consensus on event completion and its relevance to the past tense. Stuart and van der Lely (2015) tested the contrast between perfective aspect (i.e., completed events using the past tense -ed/irregular) and imperfective aspect (i.e., ongoing events using the past progressive).…”