Verb inflections and noun phrase morphology in the spontaneous speech of Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment

Spanish-speaking preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to typically developing same-age peers (TD-A) and younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU) in terms of their use of grammatical morphology in spontaneous speech. The childre...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied psycholinguistics 2005-04, Vol.26 (2), p.195-225
Main Authors: BEDORE, LISA M., LEONARD, LAURENCE B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Children
Children & youth
Clitics
Grammar
Inflection (Morphology)
Italian language
Language
Language disorders
Language Impairments
Language Skills
Language Tests
Language typology
Mean length of utterance
Morphology
Noun phrases
Preschool children
Reference (Semantic)
Romance Languages
Spanish language
Spanish Speaking
Specific language impairment
Speech
Speech therapy
Spontaneous speech
Studies
Tense
Terminology
Typology
Verbs
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Summary:Spanish-speaking preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to typically developing same-age peers (TD-A) and younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU) in terms of their use of grammatical morphology in spontaneous speech. The children with SLI showed high levels of accuracy on present tense and past tense (preterite) verb inflections. However, their use of definite articles and direct object clitics was significantly more problematic than for either the TD-MLU or the TD-A children. Substitutions and omissions were observed, especially in contexts requiring plural articles and clitics. Many of the details of the observed Spanish SLI profile were predicted by Wexler's (Extended) Unique Checking Constraint (EUCC) proposal. Remaining details in the data could be accommodated by making additional assumptions within the same general linguistic framework as the EUCC. Some of the differences between the findings from Spanish and those from previous studies on related languages such as Italian suggest the need for clinical assessment and intervention procedures that are shaped as much by language-specific details as by the language's typology.
ISSN:0142-7164
1469-1817
DOI:10.1017/S0142716405050149