Profiles of Grammatical Morphology and Sentence Imitation in Children With Specific Language Impairment and Down Syndrome

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 720-732 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. A. Eadie ◽  
M. E. Fey ◽  
J. M. Douglas ◽  
C. L. Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Down Syndrome ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Composite Measures ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Sentence Imitation ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance

The purpose of the present study was to examine the grammatical morphology and sentence imitation performance of two different groups of children with language impairment and to compare their performance with that of children learning language typically. Expressive use of tense-bearing and non-tenserelated grammatical morphemes was explored. Children with specific language impairment (SLI), with Down syndrome (DS), and with typical language development (TL) were matched on mean length of utterance (MLU). Performance was compared primarily on composite measures of tense, tense inflections, and nontense morphemes, as well as on the Sentences subtest of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence—Revised (WPPSI-R; D. Wechsler, 1989). Exploratory analyses were completed on a set of 11 individual grammatical morphemes as a follow-up to the principal analyses. As predicted, the children with SLI performed significantly more poorly than the children with TL on all three composite measures. In addition, the DS group exhibited significantly weaker performance than did the TL group on the tense inflections and non-tense morpheme composites. Although there were no statistically reliable differences between the SLI and DS groups on any morpheme measure, the groups were not comparably weak in their use of the regular past, -ed; the irregular third person singular morphemes (e.g., has, does); the present progressive, -ing; or the use of modals. The SLI and DS groups both performed more poorly than did the TL group on the sentence imitation task.

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.

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.

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.

Phonology and grammatical morphology in specific language impairment: Accounting for individual variation in English and Italian

1996 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Umberta Bortolini ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Individual Variation ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Italian Children ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance

ABSTRACTChildren with specific language impairment (SLI) often show more limited use of grammatical morphology than younger, normally developing children matched according to mean length of utterance (MLU). However, within groups of children with SLI, individual differences are seen in grammatical morpheme use. In this study, we examined the role of weak syllable use in explaining some of these differences. Employing two different languages – English and Italian - children with SLI were placed into pairs. The children in each pair showed similar MLUs; however, one member of the pair showed a greater use of particular function words. In each of the pairs examined in both languages, the children with the greater use of function words also showed a greater use of weak syllables that did not immediately follow strong syllables. The weak syllable productions of children showing a more limited use of function words in each pair seemed to be dependent on a strong syllable-weak syllable production sequence. This sequence appeared to be operative across several prosodic levels, as defined within the framework of prosodic phonology. Because weak syllables that follow strong syllables usually have longer durations than those that precede strong syllables, the findings might have a perceptual basis. However, the results raise the possibility that limitations in prosody can restrict the degree of grammatical morpheme use by children with SLI.

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.

Grammatical Deficits in Italian-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 809-820 ◽  
Author(s):  
Umberta Bortolini ◽  
Maria Cristina Caselli ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Error Type ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Ambient Language ◽  
Third Person ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Type Data ◽  
Verb Inflections ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance

In earlier work, Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been shown to exhibit a profile of grammatical morpheme difficulties that is quite different from the profile seen for English-speaking children with SLI. In the present study, this difference was confirmed using a wider range of grammatical morpheme types. A group of Italian-speaking children with SLI produced articles and third person plural verb inflections with lower percentages in obligatory contexts than a group of age controls and a group of younger controls matched for mean length of utterance (MLU). However, the children with SLI closely resembled the MLU controls in their production of noun plural inflections, third person copula forms, first person singular and plural verb inflections, and third person singular verb inflections. Errors on articles and copula forms were usually omissions whereas errors on verb inflections were usually productions of inappropriate finite inflections. Infinitives were seen in contexts requiring finite forms but they were not the dominant error type. Data from comprehension tasks raise the possibility that production factors were responsible for some of the differences seen. The findings of this study suggest that accounts of SLI are incomplete unless they assign a major role to the relative ease of identifying and interpreting the relevant data in the ambient language. The implications of these findings for current accounts of SLI are discussed.

Deficits in Finite Verb Morphology

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-707 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol A. Miller ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Finite Verb

The grammatical morphology deficits common in children with specific language impairment (SLI) are characterized in some models as linguistic deficits. Such models must assume some mechanism for correct productions of finite verb forms. Three such assumptions were tested by analyzing speech samples from 18 children with SLI (aged 3 years 6 months to 6 years 9 months). Assumption 1, that nonfinite forms are used consistently until replaced by memorized finite forms, was tested by examining the distribution of verb types in present thirdperson singular and noun types in present third-person singular contractible copula contexts. Significantly more word types than expected were inflected inconsistently. Both Assumption 2, that finite and nonfinite verb forms are memorized but used indiscriminately, and Assumption 3, that affixation rules are applied indiscriminately, predict random use of finite forms. This prediction was not supported.

French-English Bilingual Children With SLI

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanne Paradis ◽  
Martha Crago ◽  
Fred Genesee ◽  
Mabel Rice
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
French Speaking

The goal of this study was to determine whether bilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI) are similar to monolingual age mates with SLI, in each language. Eight French-English bilingual children with SLI were compared to agematched monolingual children with SLI, both English and French speaking, with respect to their use of morphosyntax in language production. Specifically, using the extended optional infinitive (EOI) framework, the authors examined the children’s use of tense-bearing and non-tense-bearing morphemes in obligatory context in spontaneous speech. Analyses revealed that the patterns predicted by the EOI framework were borne out for both the monolingual and bilingual children with SLI: The bilingual and monolingual children with SLI showed greater accuracy with non-tense than with tense morphemes. Furthermore, the bilingual and monolingual children with SLI had similar mean accuracy scores for tense morphemes, indicating that the bilingual children did not exhibit more profound deficits in the use of these grammatical morphemes than their monolingual peers. In sum, the bilingual children with SLI in this study appeared similar to their monolingual peers for the aspects of grammatical morphology examined in each language. These bilingual-monolingual similarities point to the possibility that SLI may not be an impediment to learning two languages, at least in the domain of grammatical morphology.

The use of grammatical morphemes reflecting aspect and modality by children with specific language impairment

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-795 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURENCE B. LEONARD ◽  
PATRICIA DEEVY ◽  
CAROL A. MILLER ◽  
MONIQUE CHAREST ◽  
ROBERT KURTZ ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Action Context ◽  
Third Person ◽  
English Speaking

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have well-documented problems in the use of tense-related grammatical morphemes. However, in English, tense often overlaps with aspect and modality. In this study, 15 children with SLI (mean age 5;2) and two groups of 15 typically developing children (mean ages 3;6 and 5;3) were compared in terms of their use of previously studied morphemes in contexts that more clearly assessed the role of aspect. The children's use of less frequently studied morphemes tied to modality or tense was also examined. The children with SLI were found to use -ing to mark progressive aspect in past as well as present contexts, even though they were relatively poor in using the tense morphemes (auxiliary was, were) that should accompany the progressive inflection. These children were inconsistent in their use of third person singular -s to describe habitual actions that were not occurring during the time of their utterance. However, the pattern of the children's use suggested that the source of the problem was the formal tense feature of the inflection, not the habitual action context. The children's use of modal can was comparable to that of the typically developing children, raising the possibility that the modality function of possibility had been learned without necessarily acquiring the tense feature of this morpheme. These children's proficiency with can suggests that their bare verb stem productions should probably not be re-interpreted as cases of missing modals. Together these findings suggest that the more serious tense-related problems seen in English-speaking children with SLI co-occur with a less impaired ability to express temporal relations through aspect and modality.

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