Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are known to have limited lexicons. Previous studies implicate a possible processing problem, in the form of a limited ability to comprehend new words in settings that require Quick Incidental Learning (QUIL). This study investigates further the factors contributing to limited QUIL by examining the effects of input frequency and word type (nouns vs. verbs). In addition, immediate versus long-term memory was examined for possible problems with storage mechanisms. Subjects were 30 5-year-old SLI children with receptive and expressive language deficits and two comparison groups of normally developing children: 30 MLU-equivalent and 30 CA-equivalent. The subjects were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions in which they viewed video story presentations in which targeted words were embedded. The conditions varied by number of word presentations, 0, 3, or 10. The 0 condition was a control condition in which familiar words were presented. Children's word comprehension was tested immediately following viewing and again several days later. The findings confirm a strong frequency effect, but one that is influenced by group status, word type, and retention demands. There is evidence of a robust representational mapping ability for SLI, which is at the same time modulated by a minimum input constraint and apparent problems with storage into long-term memory.KEY WORDS: language acquisition, specific language Impairment, word acquisition, frequency of Input, noun and verb acquisition 106 0022-4685943701-0106$0 1.00/0

This study examined the productivity and representation of past-tense marking in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Participants were 11 6-year-olds with SLI, 11 age-matched controls, and 11 MLU-matched controls. Regular and irregular verbs were used to examine the productivity of regular marking. Past-tense representation was examined by asking children to inflect homophonous pairs of denominal and irregular root verbs. All three groups demonstrated productive marking of past tense, although as expected the accuracy of the impaired groups was less than that of earlier control group. Patterns of past-tense marking as a function of a word's phonological composition and inflectional frequency were the same for the SLI- and MLU-matched groups, and all children presented a past-tense system that was sensitive to grammatical structure. The findings replicate previous research of the SLI morphological system and provide additional specification of these children's morphological strengths and weaknesses. Strengths include the children's sensitivity to grammatical and phonological characteristics of the lexicon; weaknesses include limited productivity of regular past-tense marking and a greater sensitivity to frequency manipulations as compared to normally developing children. Results are discussed in terms of the nature of the SLI profile. They also are used to evaluate the theoretical model on which the study was based.

This study examined Quick Incidental Learning (QUIL) of novel vocabulary by two groups of school-age children, those who were developing language normally and those who demonstrated a specific language impairment (SLI). The experimental items consisted of 20 words that referred to one of four semantic classes: object, attribute, action, and affective state. Videotaped stories were used to introduce the novel words, and word learning was measured by a picture-pointing task. For the normally developing children, the results documented a robust ability to learn words in the early school years. Comprehension gains were observed for all four word types, with the greatest gain made on the object labels. The children with SLI also demonstrated some word-learning ability, but their gain was significantly less than that of their normally developing peers. Although the general pattern of word effects was similar across the two groups, the children with SLI demonstrated a particularly low gain on words from the action class.

Most work looking at specific language impairment (SLI) has been done in the context of mainstream dialects. This paper extends the study of SLI to two nonmainstream dialects: a rural version of Southern African American English (SAAE) and a rural version of Southern White English (SWE). Data were language samples from 93 4-to 6-year-olds who lived in southeastern Louisiana Forty were classified as speakers of SAAE, and 53 were classified as speakers of SWE. A third were previously diagnosed σs SLI; the others served as either age-matched (6N) or language-matched (4N) controls.The two dialects differed in frequency of usage on 14 of the 35 coded morphosyntactic surface patterns; speakers of these dialects could be successfully discriminated (94%) from each other in a discriminant analysis using just four of these patterns. Across dialects, four patterns resulted in main effects that were related to diagnostic condition (SLI vs. 6N), and a slightly different set of four patterns showed effects that were related to developmental processes (4N vs. 6N). More interestingly, the surface characteristics of SLI were found to manifest in the two dialects in different ways. A discriminant function based solely on SAAE speakers tended to misclassify SWE children with SLI as having normal language, and a discriminant function based on SWE speakers tended to misclassify SAAE unaffected children as SLI. Patterns within the SLI profile that cut across the two dialects included difficulties with tense marking and question formation. The results provide important direction for future studies and argue for the inclusion of contrastive as well as noncontrastive features of dialects within SLI research. Keywords dialect; specific language impairment; morphosyntaxIn a recent publication, Tager-Flusberg and Cooper (1999) summarize the comments of participants from an NIH-sponsored workshop that focused on the study of specific language impairment (SLI). The participants included experts in the fields of SLI and other developmental disorders such as autism, learning disabilities, and dyslexia. As part of the report, the authors highlight important study topics to help guide future research. One of the recommendations listed in the report is the development of constructs that are important for defining SLI in individuals who come from many language, cultural, and dialect backgrounds.The goal of the current work is to begin, at an exploratory level, to extend the study of SLI to two nonmainstream dialects of English. Although the grammatical profile of SLI has been explored in a wide range of languages, including Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, and even Inukitut (an Eskimo- NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptAleut language) (Leonard, 1998), the study of SLI within nonmainstream varieties of these languages has been nonexistent. A primary reason for this has been limited knowledge on the part of researchers about the developmenta...

Three different approaches to the characterization of research participants' nonmainstream dialect use can be found in the literature. They include listener judgment ratings, type-based counts of nonmainstream pattern use, and token-based counts. In this paper, we examined these three approaches, as well as shortcuts to these methods, using language samples from 93 children previously described in J. Oetting and J. McDonald (2001). Nonmainstream dialects represented in the samples included rural Louisiana versions of Southern White English (SWE) and Southern African American English (SAAE). Depending on the method and shortcut used, correct dialect classifications (SWE or SAAE) were made for 88% to 97% of the participants; however, regression algorithms had to be applied to the type- and token-based results to achieve these outcomes. For characterizing the rate at which the participants produced the nonmainstream patterns, the token-based methods were found to be superior to the others, but estimates from all approaches were moderately to highly correlated with each other. When type- and/or token-based methods were used to characterize participants' dialect type and rate, the number of patterns included in the analyses could be substantially reduced without significantly affecting the validity of the outcomes. These findings have important implications for future child language studies that are done within the context of dialect diversity.