scholarly journals Third person singular -s in typical development and specific language impairment: Input and neighbourhood density

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 232-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin B. Kueser ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Patricia Deevy
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Typical Development ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Third Person

scholarly journals Production and Processing of Subject–Verb Agreement in Monolingual Dutch Children With Specific Language Impairment

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 952-965 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elma Blom ◽  
Nada Vasić ◽  
Jan de Jong
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Typical Development ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Test Sensitivity ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Listening Task ◽  
Dutch Children

Purpose In this study, the authors investigated whether errors with subject–verb agreement in monolingual Dutch children with specific language impairment (SLI) are influenced by verb phonology. In addition, the productive and receptive abilities of Dutch acquiring children with SLI regarding agreement inflection were compared. Method An SLI group (6–8 years old), an age-matched group with typical development, and a language-matched, younger, typically developing (TD) group participated in the study. Using an elicitation task, the authors tested use of third person singular inflection after verbs that ended in obstruents (plosive, fricative) or nonobstruents (sonorant). The authors used a self-paced listening task to test sensitivity to subject–verb agreement violations. Results Omission was more frequent after obstruents than nonobstruents; the younger TD group used inflection less often after plosives than fricatives, unlike the SLI group. The SLI group did not detect subject–verb agreement violations if the ungrammatical structure contained a frequent error (omission), but if the ungrammatical structure contained an infrequent error (substitution), subject–verb agreement violations were noticed. Conclusions The use of agreement inflection by children with TD or SLI is affected by verb phonology. Differential effects in the 2 groups are consistent with a delayed development in Dutch SLI. Parallels between productive and receptive abilities point to weak lexical agreement inflection representations in Dutch SLI.

scholarly journals Input sources of third person singular -s inconsistency in children with and without specific language impairment

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 786-820 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURENCE B. LEONARD ◽  
MARC E. FEY ◽  
PATRICIA DEEVY ◽  
SHELLEY L. BREDIN-OJA
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Typical Development ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Simple Sentences

ABSTRACTWe tested four predictions based on the assumption that optional infinitives can be attributed to properties of the input whereby children inappropriately extract non-finite subject–verb sequences (e.g. the girl run) from larger input utterances (e.g. Does the girl run? Let's watch the girl run). Thirty children with specific language impairment (SLI) and thirty typically developing children heard novel and familiar verbs that appeared exclusively either in utterances containing non-finite subject–verb sequences or in simple sentences with the verb inflected for third person singular -s. Subsequent testing showed strong input effects, especially for the SLI group. The results provide support for input-based factors as significant contributors not only to the optional infinitive period in typical development, but also to the especially protracted optional infinitive period seen in SLI.

scholarly journals Pragmatic versus structural difficulties in the production of pronominal clitics in French-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 239694151879964 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Prévost ◽  
Laurice Tuller ◽  
Racha Zebib ◽  
Marie Anne Barthez ◽  
Joëlle Malvy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Children With Autism ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
First Person ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Structural Language

Background and aims Impaired production of third person accusative pronominal clitics is a signature of language impairment in French-speaking children. It has been found to be a prominent and persistent difficulty in children and adolescents with specific language impairment. Previous studies have reported that many children with autism spectrum disorder also have low performance on these clitics. However, it remains unclear whether these difficulties in children with autism spectrum disorder are due to structural language impairment or to pragmatic deficits. This is because pragmatics skills, notoriously weak in children with autism spectrum disorder, are also needed for appropriate use of pronouns. Use of pronouns without clear referents and difficulty with discourse pronouns (first and second person), which require taking into account the point of view of one’s interlocutor (perspective shifting), have frequently been reported for autism spectrum disorder. Methods We elicited production of nominative, reflexive and accusative third and first person pronominal clitics in 19 verbal children with autism spectrum disorder (aged 6–12, high and low functioning, with structural language impairment, or with normal language) and 19 age-matched children with specific language impairment. If pragmatics is behind difficulties on these elements, performance on first-person clitics would be expected to be worse than performance on third person clitics, since it requires perspective shifting. Furthermore, worse performance for first person clitics was expected in the children with autism spectrum disorder compared to the children with specific language impairment, since weak pragmatics is an integral part of impairment in the former, but not in the latter. More generally, different error patterns would be expected in the two groups, if the source of difficulty with clitics is different (a pragmatic deficit vs. a structural language deficit). Results Similar patterns of relative difficulties were found in the autism spectrum disorder language impairment and specific language impairment groups, with third person accusative clitics being produced at lower rates than first-person pronouns and error patterns being essentially identical. First-person pronouns did not pose particular difficulties in the children with autism spectrum disorder (language impairment or normal language) with respect to third-person pronouns or to the children with specific language impairment. Performance was not related to nonverbal intelligence in the autism spectrum disorder group. Conclusions The elicitation task used in this study included explicit instruction, and focus on perspective shifting (both visual and verbal), allowing for potential pragmatic effects to be controlled. Moreover, the task elicited a variety of types of clitics in morphosyntactic contexts of varying complexity, providing ample opportunities for employment of perspective shifting, which may have also curtailed perseveration of third person over first person. These properties of the task allowed for the grammatical nature of children’s difficulties with third-person accusative clitics to emerge unambiguously. Implications Assessment of structural language abilities in children with autism spectrum disorder requires careful consideration of task demands. The influence of pragmatic abilities on structural language performance can be circumvented by making the pragmatic demands of the task explicit and salient. Filtering out this potential influence on structural language performance is fundamental to understanding language profiles in children with autism spectrum disorder and thus which children could benefit from which kinds of language intervention.

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.

scholarly journals Children with Specific Language Impairment in Finnish: the use of tense and agreement inflections

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 999-1027 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARI KUNNARI ◽  
TUULA SAVINAINEN-MAKKONEN ◽  
LAURENCE B. LEONARD ◽  
LEENA MÄKINEN ◽  
ANNA-KAISA TOLONEN ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Verb Inflection ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person

ABSTRACTChildren with specific language impairment (SLI) vary widely in their ability to use tense/agreement inflections depending on the type of language being acquired, a fact that current accounts of SLI have tried to explain. Finnish provides an important test case for these accounts because: (1) verbs in the first and second person permit null subjects whereas verbs in the third person do not; and (2) tense and agreement inflections are agglutinating and thus one type of inflection can appear without the other. Probes were used to compare the verb inflection use of Finnish-speaking children with SLI, and both age-matched and younger typically developing children. The children with SLI were less accurate, and the pattern of their errors did not match predictions based on current accounts of SLI. It appears that children with SLI have difficulty learning complex verb inflection paradigms apart from any problem specific to tense and agreement.

scholarly journals Are Specific Language Impairment and Dyslexia Distinct Disorders?

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (6) ◽  
pp. 1378-1396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh W. Catts ◽  
Suzanne M. Adlof ◽  
Tiffany P. Hogan ◽  
Susan Ellis Weismer
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Phonological Processing ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Representative Sample ◽  
Developmental Disorders ◽  
Reading Development ◽  
Language Disorders ◽  
Nonword Repetition ◽  
Typical Development ◽  
Specific Language

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia are distinct developmental disorders. Method: Study 1 investigated the overlap between SLI identified in kindergarten and dyslexia identified in 2nd, 4th, or 8th grades in a representative sample of 527 children. Study 2 examined phonological processing in a subsample of participants, including 21 children with dyslexia only, 43 children with SLI only, 18 children with SLI and dyslexia, and 165 children with typical language/reading development. Measures of phonological awareness and nonword repetition were considered. Results: Study 1 showed limited but statistically significant overlap between SLI and dyslexia. Study 2 found that children with dyslexia or a combination of dyslexia and SLI performed significantly less well on measures of phonological processing than did children with SLI only and those with typical development. Children with SLI only showed only mild deficits in phonological processing compared with typical children. Conclusions: These results support the view that SLI and dyslexia are distinct but potentially comorbid developmental language disorders. A deficit in phonological processing is closely associated with dyslexia but not with SLI when it occurs in the absence of dyslexia.

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