The use of grammatical morphemes by normal and language-impaired children

Steckol, Karen F.; Leonard, Laurence B.

doi:10.1016/0021-9924(79)90027-3

Cited by 58 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Relative to normally developing children with comparable MLUs, children with SLI seem to have greater di culty with a range of grammatical in¯ections and free-standing closed-class morphemes (e.g., Johnston and Schery, 1976;Steckol and Leonard, 1979), and syntactic operations such as complementation and auxiliary movement (e.g., Johnston and Kamhi, 1984). Given the morphosyntacti c di culties of these children, it is not clear that they can take advantag e of syntactic information to interpret a new word as a verb with a particular meaning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Fast mapping of verbs by children with specific language impairment

Eyer

Leonard

Bedore

et al. 2002

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

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Two studies examined preschoolers' ability to assign verb interpretations to nonsense words encountered in conjunction with novel actions. Experiment 1 examined the ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and younger, normally developing peers to glean a very interpretation when the name of the figure performing the novel action was already known. The two groups of children performed in a similar, accurate fashion. Experiment 2 required preschoolers to rely exclusively on morphosyntactic information to determine whether the novel word represented an object or action. When provided with redundant morphosyntactic cues, children with SLI and language- and age-matched peers succeeded in identifying the novel words that referred to objects but not those that referred to actions. Only the age-matched normal peers were above chance levels when a noun interpretation depended on a single grammatical morpheme (e.g., 'We want the koob' versus 'We want to koob'). The findings suggest that preschoolers, whether or not they have language impairment, have difficulty using morphosyntactic information to bootstrap verbs. Furthermore, redundant but not single morphosyntactic cues facilitate the bootstrapping of nouns.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Fast mapping of verbs by children with specific language impairment

Eyer

Leonard

Bedore

et al. 2002

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

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“…In addition, grammatical morphology in SLI has also been explored in domains that are well-defined in typical development, such as Brown’s 14 grammatical morphemes (described in order of emergence): present progressive - ing , prepositions in/on , plural - s , irregular past tense, possessive - s , uncontractible copula, articles a/the , past tense - ed , third person singular - s , third person irregular, uncontractible auxiliary, contractible copula, and contractible auxiliary (Brown, 1973). While TD children master (i.e., produce 90% of the time in obligatory contexts) these morphemes in a relatively stable order between the ages of 2 and 5 (De Villiers and De Villiers, 1973), children with SLI are slower to reach mastery of correct usage of these forms in spontaneous language, and either omit them or use them incorrectly for a protracted period of time (Steckol and Leonard, 1979; Paul and Alforde, 1993). There is mixed evidence for their order of emergence in ASD (e.g., Bartolucci et al, 1980; Tek et al, 2014), so it is also unclear whether children with ASD might be slower to reach mastery of these grammatical morphemes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammatical Language Impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Exploring Language Phenotypes Beyond Standardized Testing

et al. 2017

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Linguistic and cognitive abilities manifest huge heterogeneity in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Some children present with commensurate language and cognitive abilities, while others show more variable patterns of development. Using spontaneous language samples, we investigate the presence and extent of grammatical language impairment in a heterogeneous sample of children with ASD. Findings from our sample suggest that children with ASD can be categorized into three meaningful subgroups: those with normal language, those with marked difficulty in grammatical production but relatively intact vocabulary, and those with more globally low language abilities. These findings support the use of sensitive assessment measures to evaluate language in autism, as well as the utility of within-disorder comparisons, in order to comprehensively define the various cognitive and linguistic phenotypes in this heterogeneous disorder.

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“…And finally, earlier studies have identified verb forms as an area of specific difficulty for language-impaired children (e.g. Menyuk, 1964;Ingram, 1972a;Steckol and Leonard, 1979). The third major modification to the LARSP approach is the inclusion in our analysis of categories which relate to lexical types and tokens.…”

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confidence: 97%

Characterizing language impairment in children

Fletcher

Peters

1984

Language Testing

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Disorders in ChildrenThis study compares expressive language samples from normal children ( n = 20) and language impaired children ( n = 9), matched for age and intellectual capacity, across a range of grammatical and lexical dimensions. The aims of the inquiry are to determine if it is possible to characterize language impairment (so far as it pertains to the carefully selected group of children in this study) using such dimensions, and in particular to see if the identification can be made on the basis of a subset of the large set of categories used in the original descriptive framework. An initial comparison of incidence scores based on samples of 200 utterances from each child, for 65 grammatical and lexical categories, indicates that only a third of the categories are relevant to the characterization of impairment. A discriminant function analysis using a subset of these caregories identified two variables, which, taken together, were reasonably successful in discriminating the two groups. The categories identified relate to verb premodification and inflection, and lexical verb type frequency. The implications of these findings are discussed.The question of what constitutes language impairment in children is still an open one, despite a decade or more of intensive discussion concerning both the typological features of the output of the languageimpaired, and the aetiology of language impairment (see Leonard, 1979; and Bishop, 1984, for discussion of the issues). As the longterm aim of our research is the construction of a valid diagnostic assessment procedure for use in clinical contexts, it is obviously important for us to be able to determine those features of the impaired child's language output which distinguish him from the normal child. In this study we readdress this typological issue. Since two of the major difficulties in resolving this issue are subject selection and the variety of descriptive frameworks available for linguistic data analysis, we have paid particular attention to the definition of our language-impaired group, and to the selection of a framework for analysis. The selection of subjects was made according to a detailed set of criteria which are described below in the method section (see for comparison Stark and Tallal, 1981). For the linguistic analysis we

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The use of grammatical morphemes by normal and language-impaired children

Cited by 58 publications

References 3 publications

Fast mapping of verbs by children with specific language impairment

Fast mapping of verbs by children with specific language impairment

Grammatical Language Impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Exploring Language Phenotypes Beyond Standardized Testing

Characterizing language impairment in children

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