Grammatical errors in specific language impairment: Competence or performance limitations?

1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-550 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. V. M. Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Limited Capacity ◽  
Morphological Markers ◽  
Random Errors ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Almost All

ABSTRACTSpeech samples from twelve 8- to 12-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) were analyzed. The feature deficit hypothesis maintains that SLI children may produce morphological markers (e.g., plural -s) correctly, but they do not appreciate their role in marking grammatical features. Rather, they treat them as meaningless phonological variants. Findings from the present study were incompatible with this hypothesis: (a) production of morphological markers was not random; errors were unidirectional, in almost all cases involving omission of an inflection in an obligatory context; (b) overregularization errors were sometimes observed; (c) grammatical features differed in difficulty; (d) substitution of stems for inflected forms occurred with irregular as well as regular verbs; and (e) errors of pronoun case marking were common and always involved producing an accusative form in a context demanding the nominative. Children who used a specific inflectional form correctly in some utterances omitted it in others, suggesting a limitation of performance rather than competence. There were few obvious differences between utterances that did and did not include correctly inflected forms, though there was a trend for grammatical errors to occur on words that occurred later in an utterance. It is suggested that slowed processing in a limited capacity system that is handling several operations in parallel may lead to the omission of grammatical morphemes.

The Role of Memory in Processing Relative Clauses in Children With Specific Language Impairment

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline Frizelle ◽  
Paul Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Matrix Clause ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Almost All

Purpose This study investigated the relationship between 2 components of memory—phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and working memory (WM)—and the control of relative clause constructions in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method Children with SLI and 2 control groups—an age-matched and a younger group of children with typical development—repeated sentences, including relative clauses, representing 5 syntactic roles and 2 levels of matrix clause complexity. The Working Memory Test Battery for Children was administered. Results All 3 groups showed significant associations between pSTM and both types of matrix clause construction. For children with SLI, significant associations emerged between (a) WM and more complex matrix clause constructions, (b) WM and relative clauses including a range of syntactic roles, and (c) pSTM and the least difficult syntactic role. In contrast, the age-matched control group could repeat almost all syntactic roles without invoking the use of either memory component. Conclusions The role of pSTM and WM in the production of relative clauses by children with SLI is influenced by the degree of difficulty of the structure to be recalled. In therapy, the effect of WM limitations can be minimized by approaching each structure within the context of a simple matrix clause.

Grammatical Morphology and the Role of Weak Syllables in the Speech of Italian-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 1363-1374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Umberta Bortolini
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
Input Processing ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Verb Inflections

Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to a group of younger control children in their use of auxiliary verbs, pronominal clitics, infinitives, present tense verb inflections, and articles. Differences favoring the control children were found for those morphemes that required the production of nonfinal weak syllables. On other grammatical morphemes, the two groups did not differ. A relationship was seen between the use of morphemes requiring nonfinal weak syllables and the use of nonfinal weak syllables that had no morpheme status. The findings are considered from the perspective of both prosodic production limitations and limitations in input processing.

Grammatical Morphology Deficits in Spanish-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 905-924 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Bedore ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Clinical Markers ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Third Person

The focus of this study was the use of grammatical morphology by Spanish-speaking preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI). Relative to both same-age peers and younger typically developing children with similar mean lengths of utterance (MLUs), the children with SLI showed more limited use of several different grammatical morphemes. These limitations were most marked for noun-related morphemes such as adjective-agreement inflections and direct object clitics. Most errors on the part of children in all groups consisted of substitutions of a form that shared most but not all of the target’s grammatical features (e.g., correct tense and number but incorrect person). Number errors usually involved singular forms used in plural contexts; person errors usually involved third person forms used in first person contexts. The pattern of limitations of the children with SLI suggests that, for languages such as Spanish, additional factors might have to be considered in the search for clinical markers for this disorder. Implications for evaluation and treatment of language disorders in Spanish-speaking children are also discussed.

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

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 741-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Julia A. Eyer ◽  
Lisa M. Bedore ◽  
Bernard G. Grela
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Implicit Rule ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance

Several hypotheses have been offered to explain the grammatical morpheme difficulties observed in the speech of children with specific language impairment. Three of the accounts that could be evaluated in English were the focus of this study: the extended optional infinitive account, the implicit rule deficit account, and the surface account. Preschoolers with specific language impairment, a group of age controls, and a group of younger children matched for mean length of utterance were evaluated in their use of several theory-relevant grammatical morphemes. The findings revealed advantages for both the surface and extended optional infinitive hypotheses. In contrast, a test of the predictions based on the implicit rule deficit account suggested that the children studied here were not experiencing a deficit of this type.

Towards the use of phonological markedness and extraprosodicity in accounting for morphological errors in Specific Language Impairment

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-272
Author(s):  
Öner Özçelik
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Processing Capacity ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Prosodic Structures

Abstract Certain grammatical morphemes are variably produced in the speech of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Previous research tends to view this as a consequence of either a deficit in linguistic knowledge or a limitation in processing capacity; however, both approaches raise problems. For example, linguistic accounts are unable to explain why these children’s problems are mostly with production rather than comprehension. Processing accounts, on the other hand, have difficulty explaining why affected children have differing levels of problems with grammatical morphemes that are similar on the surface (e.g. English plural -s vs. third person singular -s). In this paper, a new, phonological account is proposed which avoids these problems, and better captures the wide array of data presented in the literature. It is proposed that children with SLI have problems with organizing segmental data into prosodic structures that are linguistically highly marked, in particular those that involve various forms of extraprosodicity.

Some influences on the grammar of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Letizia Sabbadini ◽  
Virginia Volterra ◽  
Jeanette S. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Speech Production ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Surface Characteristics ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Syntactic Differences

ABSTRACTThe spontaneous speech of both English-speaking (E) and Italian-speaking (I) children with specific language impairment (SLI) was examined to determine (a) whether phonological factors influence the grammatical morpheme use of ISLI children, as has been found for ESLI children, and (b) whether ESLI and ISLI children show similar syntactic abilities at the same level of mean utterance length as measured in words. The results indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced the ISLI children's tendency to use articles – the only Italian grammatical morphemes in which word-final consonants are required. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the ESLI and ISLI children. However, both groups of children seemed to have a problem using morphemes that constituted unstressed elements in a sentence even though the grammatical and semantic function of these elements varied across the two languages. The findings suggest that a speech production or perception component may be playing a greater role than previously believed in contributing to SLI children's well-documented expressive grammatical difficulties, though the specific effects of this factor will vary as a function of the surface characteristics of the language being acquired.

Grammatical Morphology and Speech Perception in Children With Specific Language Impairment

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 1076-1085 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Karla K. McGregor ◽  
George D. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Speech Stream ◽  
Speech Stimuli ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Performance Profiles

Many English-speaking children with specific language impairment have been found to be especially weak in their use of grammatical morphology. In a separate literature, many children meeting the same subject description have shown significant limitations on tasks involving the perception of rapid acoustic changes. In this study, we attempted to determine whether there were parallels between the grammatical morphological limitations of children with specific language impairment and their performance profiles across several perceptual contrasts. Because most English grammatical morphemes have shorter durations relative to adjacent morphemes in the speech stream, we hypothesized that children with specific language impairment would be especially weak in discriminating speech stimuli whose contrastive portions had shorter durations than the noncontrastive portions. Results from a group of eight children with specific language impairment with documented morphological difficulties confirmed these predictions. Several possible accounts of the observed morphology-perception parallels are offered.

Sensitivity to Grammatical Morphemes in Children With Specific Language Impairment

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (5) ◽  
pp. 1147-1157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary McNamara ◽  
Allyson Carter ◽  
Bonnie McIntosh ◽  
LouAnn Gerken
Keyword(s):  
Target Word ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Grammatical Sentence

Grammatical morphemes, such as articles and auxiliary verbs, provide potentially useful information to language learners. However, children with specific language impairment (SLI) frequently fail to produce grammatical morphemes, raising questions about their sensitivity to them. To address this issue, two experiments were conducted in which 3- to 5-year-old children with SLI and with normally developing language (NL) heard sentences asking them to identify a picture corresponding to a named target word. The target occurred in either a grammatical sentence or one with an incorrectly used grammatical morpheme. In Experiment 1, the picture representing the target occurred with three unrelated distractor pictures. In Experiment 2, distractor sets included pictures that were semantically related to the target. In both studies, the SLI group chose fewer correct pictures when the target followed an incorrectly used morpheme. In Experiment 2, the SLI group chose more semantically related than unrelated distractors. These results suggest that children with SLI are sensitive to grammatical morphemes and that their incorrect picture choices may reflect a failure to maintain the target in memory.

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