The use of negative inflections by Finnish-speaking children with and without specific language impairment

Abstract

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty expressing subject-verb agreement. However, in many languages, tense is fused with agreement, making it difficult to attribute the problem to agreement in particular. In Finnish, negative markers are function words that agree with the subject in person and number but do not express tense, providing an opportunity to assess the status of agreement in a more straightforward way. Fifteen Finnish-speaking preschoolers with SLI, 15 age controls, and 15 younger controls responded to items requiring negative markers in first person singular and plural, and third person singular and plural. The children with SLI were less accurate than both typically developing groups. However, their problems were limited to particular person-number combinations. Furthermore, the children with SLI appeared to have difficulty selecting the form of the lexical verb that should accompany the negative marker, suggesting that agreement was not the sole difficulty.

Sentence Repetition as a Tool for Screening Morphosyntactic Abilities of Bilectal Children with SLI

“…Emergence of pu -relatives and oti -clauses follow later. Further, the structures included are those that have been found to be problematic for children with SLI either in Greek (including CG) (Stavrakaki, 2001 ; Theodorou and Grohmann, 2012 ) or in other languages, as the international literature (e.g., Leonard, 2001 ; Friedmann and Novogrodsky, 2004 ; Kunnari et al, 2014 ) suggests. The test consists of 24 items exploring the imitation of structures within six syntactic categories with four examples of each type: object relative clauses (1), subject relative clauses (2), embedded oti “that”-clauses (3), adjunct giati “because”-clauses (4), negative den -sentences (5), and subjunctive na -clauses (6).…”

Language impairments in children with developmental language disorder and children with high-functioning autism plus language impairment: Evidence from Chinese negative sentences

“…The failure in feature agreement is the underlying cause of ungrammaticality in some negative sentences as discussed in the previous section. The proposition that the agreement relationship is a locus of grammatical difficulty in children with DLD has been confirmed in several studies investigating children with DLD speaking English (Clahsen et al, 1997), Dutch (Blom et al, 2014), French (Paradis and Crago, 2001), German (Rice et al, 1997), Hebrew (Dromi et al, 1999), Italian (Rispens and Been, 2007), and Finnish (Kunnari et al, 2014). A question remains to be investigated is, whether children with ASD also have difficulty with feature agreement.…”

“…Agreement relationship is a locus of grammatical weakness in the DLD group ( Clahsen et al, 1997 ; Tsimpli and Stavrakaki, 1999 ; Moscati et al, 2020 ). Deficits in feature agreement are striking characteristics of the DLD group’s difficulties with negative structures ( Kunnari et al, 2014 ). Tests of negative structures also mirror the language impairments of the ASD population ( Shapiro and Kapit, 1978 ; Tager-Flusberg et al, 1990 ; Schindele et al, 2008 ; Cuccio, 2012 ).…”