Earlier reports of verb morphology use by Hebrew-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) have suggested that these children mark agreement with the subject as accurately as younger control children matched according to mean length of utterance (MLU). This issue was examined in greater detail in the present study by including a wider range of agreement inflections from the present and past tense paradigms and employing verbs of different patterns (binyanim). It was hypothesized that children with SLI would be more limited than would MLU controls in their use of agreement inflections within past tense because the past tense agreement paradigm of Hebrew requires the simultaneous manipulation of three features-person, number, and gender. Differences between the groups were not expected for the use of agreement inflections within present tense, because only two features-number and gender-must be manipulated in the present tense paradigm. A group of preschool-age children with SLI was found to have more difficulty than did MLU controls in the use of most past tense agreement inflections. Within present tense, the two groups differed in their use of agreement inflections in only one pattern. For both groups, most errant productions differed from the target form by only one feature, usually person or tense. We found no feature that was consistently problematic for the children. The findings are discussed within a limited processing capacity framework.

During the one-word stage, Hebrew-speaking children have only one form for each verb paradigm, and this is usually the free stem. Crucially, the children tend not to produce verbs with inflectional suffixes, although their prosodic phonology allows them to do so. We argue that this phenomenon reflects the childrens capacity to distinguish between stems and suffixes (by identifying the stem) before they start producing the morphological paradigm. That is, some morphological knowledge appears before this knowledge has a direct surface manifestation in the childrens speech.

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When children have to select one of two structures, do they start with the universally unmarked structure or with the one preferred by the ambient language? Th is question is directly relevant to metrical systems, which often employ either iambs or the universally unmarked trochees. We argue that children start with the universally unmarked trochaic foot, unless their ambient language provides them with suffi cient data to arrive at the language-specifi c preferred foot prior to the onset of speech. We show that Hebrew-acquiring children, unlike French ones, are exposed to ambiguous data, which do not allow them to determine the type of foot the language's stress system employs. Our quantitative data provide evidence that in such a case, children adhere to the trochaic foot during the very early stage of acquisition (in the case study presented here, the early stage of acquisition refers to the fi rst 100 cumulative target words). Later on, children follow the frequency-based preference in Hebrew, where fi nal stress, and thus the iambic foot is employed in about 75% of the nouns.

Verb morphology is often an area of extraordinary difficulty for children with specific language impairment (SLI). However, in Hebrew, this difficulty appears to be more circumscribed than in other languages. In a recent study by Dromi et al., the limitations exhibited by a group of Hebrew-speaking children with SLI were confined primarily to the use of agreement inflections within past tense. This difficulty was interpreted as being due to the fact that the agreement paradigm within past tense is rather complex (involving person, number, and gender, along with tense). This study explores another possibility--that these inflections were difficult because they required past tense in particular. Also determined was whether the children's frequent use of the morphologically simplest forms (such as past third person masculine singular) in place of the correct forms could be interpreted as their selection of a non-finite default form. A group of Hebrew-speaking children with SLI (age 4.2 to 6.1) participated, along with a group of age controls, and a group of younger normally developing children matched for mean length of utterance (MLU). The children listened to stories that were accompanied by pictures. During each story, the children completed the experimenter's incomplete sentences using appropriate verbs. To complete the sentences accurately, the children had to alter the tense or finiteness of the verb used by the experimenter in the preceding sentence. The results indicated that the children with SLI had more difficulty than both comparison groups in the production of basic present and past forms and infinitive forms of verbs that required use of one particular phonological template or 'binyan'. However, for the verbs requiring the remaining three phonological templates, the children with SLI were as capable as MLU controls in their command of past as well as present tense, and in their use of infinitive forms. It is concluded that tense and finiteness probably do not form the core of the problem faced by Hebrew-speaking children with SLI in the area of verb morphology.