Three Accounts of the Grammatical Morpheme Difficulties of English-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

Leonard, Laurence B.; Eyer, Julia A.; Bedore, Lisa M.; Grela, Bernard

doi:10.1044/jslhr.4004.741

Cited by 293 publications

(258 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Importantly, though, these errors were only made for irregular verbs. This pattern of past tense marking in language impaired children with autism is uncharacteristic of that in SLI in which bare stem errors are characteristically observed only with regular forms (Leonard et al, 1992;Leonard, Eyer, Bedore & Grela, 1997;Oetting & Horohov, 1997). In sum, the kinds of errors in tense marking of regular verbs made by language impaired children with ASD do not closely resemble the kinds of errors made by children with SLI (cf.…”

Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Language in autism and specific language impairment: Where are the links?

Williams

Botting

Boucher

2008

Psychological Bulletin

167

148

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It has been suggested that language impairment in autism is behaviourally, neurobiologically, and etiologically related to specific language impairment (SLI). In this paper, we review evidence at each level and argue that the vast majority of data does not support the view that language impairment in autism can be explained in terms of co-morbid SLI. We make recommendations for how this debate might be resolved and we suggest a shift in research focus. We recommend that researchers concentrate on those aspects of language impairment that predominate in each disorder rather than on those comparatively small areas of potential overlap.

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Section: Summary and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Language in autism and specific language impairment: Where are the links?

Williams

Botting

Boucher

2008

Psychological Bulletin

167

148

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“…Numerous researchers have put forth the hypothesis that the protracted language development exhibited by children with SLI is the result of deficits in basic cognitive and perceptual processes that are essential for learning and producing language as well as for certain other cognitive operations (Ellis Weismer, Evans, and Hesketh (1999), Leonard, Bortolini, Caselli, McGregor, and Sabbadini (1992), Leonard and Eyer (1996), Leonard, Eyer, Bedore, and Grela (1997), Marton and Schwartz (2003), Miller, Kail, Leonard, and Tomblin (2001); and see review in Leonard (1998)). For example, the Generalized Slowing Hypothesis (GSH) holds that because children with SLI have demonstrable limitations in speed of processing, interpreted through reaction time in both linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks when compared with unaffected age-matched children, these limitations slow down their ability to take in linguistic input, store it in memory, and in turn access appropriate structures in language production (Miller et al (2001), Windsor and Huang (1999), Windsor, Milbrath, Carney, and Rakowski (2001); but see Lahey, Edwards, and Munson (2001)).…”

Section: Domain-general and Domain-specific Accounts Of Slimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…All other things are seldom equal, and accordingly, Leonard (1998) put forward a domain-general account of SLI that combines the GSH with a perceptual limitation account, the Surface Hypothesis (SH) (Leonard et al (1992), Leonard and Eyer (1996), Leonard et al (1997)). Building on research showing that children with SLI have limitations compared to unaffected age mates in their abilities to perceive perceptual contrasts differentiated by sounds with brief phonetic duration and display phonological processes such as final consonant and weak syllable deletion more than unaffected age mates, Leonard and his colleagues (Leonard (1998), Leonard et al (1992), Leonard and Eyer (1996), Leonard et al (1997)) hypothesized that grammatical morphemes that are of short duration or otherwise phonologically nonsalient would be more difficult for children with SLI to perceive and encode in a stable representation.…”

Section: Domain-general and Domain-specific Accounts Of Slimentioning

confidence: 99%

Domain-General Versus Domain-Specific Accounts of Specific Language Impairment: Evidence From Bilingual Children's Acquisition of Object Pronouns

Paradis

Crago²,

Genesee³

2006

Language Acquisition

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In this study, we tested the predictions of 2 opposing perspectives on the nature of the deficit in specific language impairment (SLI): the domain-general, cognitive/ perceptual processing view and the domain-specific, linguistic representational view. Data consisted of spontaneous speech samples from French-English bilingual children with SLI; younger, typically developing, bilingual language peers, and monolingual French comparison groups. We analyzed the children's use of direct object clitics/pronouns and definite articles in French and English. The bilingual children had more difficulty with clitics in French than articles in French and pronouns in English; and bilingual children with SLI performed like their younger, unaffected bilingual peers and like monolinguals with SLI. We argue that these findings present challenges to the domain-general perspective and support the claim that domain-specific limitations in linguistic representation are a component of SLI.

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“…For example, Tallal and Piercy (13) found that some children with SLI have difficulty reporting the order of pairs of high-and low-frequency sounds when these sounds are brief in duration and presented rapidly. Such a deficit may underlie difficulties in perceiving grammatical forms (e.g., the or is), which are generally brief and unstressed (17).…”

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confidence: 99%

Deficits in speech perception predict language learning impairment

Ziegler

Pech-Georgel

George

et al. 2005

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

179

147

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Specific language impairment (SLI) is one of the most common childhood disorders, affecting 7% of children. These children experience difficulties in understanding and producing spoken language despite normal intelligence, normal hearing, and normal opportunities to learn language. The causes of SLI are still hotly debated, ranging from nonlinguistic deficits in auditory perception to high-level deficits in grammar. Here, we show that children with SLI have poorer-than-normal consonant identification when measured in ecologically valid conditions of stationary or fluctuating masking noise. The deficits persisted even in comparison with a younger group of normally developing children who were matched for language skills. This finding points to a fundamental deficit. Information transmission of all phonetic features (voicing, place, and manner) was impaired, although the deficits were strongest for voicing (e.g., difference between͞b͞and͞p͞). Children with SLI experienced perfectly normal ''release from masking'' (better identification in fluctuating than in stationary noise), which indicates a central deficit in feature extraction rather than deficits in low-level, temporal, and spectral auditory capacities. We further showed that speech identification in noise predicted language impairment to a great extent within the group of children with SLI and across all participants. Previous research might have underestimated this important link, possibly because speech perception has typically been investigated in optimal listening conditions using non-speech material. The present study suggests that children with SLI learn language deviantly because they inefficiently extract and manipulate speech features, in particular, voicing. This result offers new directions for the fast diagnosis and remediation of SLI.phonetic deficit ͉ auditory deficit ͉ speech intelligibility ͉ masking noise ͉ specific language impairment M any children experience unexpected difficulties in understanding and producing spoken language despite normal intelligence, normal hearing, normal opportunities to learn language, and in the absence of any obvious neurological problems (for review, see ref. 1). This disorder is typically called specific language impairment (SLI). In the past years, research on SLI has experienced a growth of interest partially because it has become clear that more children than initially thought show language learning difficulties. Indeed, recent epidemiological studies estimate the incidence of SLI to be Ϸ7.4% in a population of monolingual English-speaking kindergarten children (2). Children with SLI exhibit deficits in several aspects of language, including phonology, morphology, and syntax (1, 3). One of the hallmarks of SLI is a deficit in the use of function morphemes (e.g., the, a, and is) and other grammatical morphology (e.g., plural -s, past tense -ed). Children with SLI also are at high risk for subsequent literacy problems (4).The causes of SLI are still hotly debated. Current theories of SLI fall into two categ...

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Three Accounts of the Grammatical Morpheme Difficulties of English-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

Cited by 293 publications

References 14 publications

Language in autism and specific language impairment: Where are the links?

Language in autism and specific language impairment: Where are the links?

Domain-General Versus Domain-Specific Accounts of Specific Language Impairment: Evidence From Bilingual Children's Acquisition of Object Pronouns

Deficits in speech perception predict language learning impairment

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