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.

Two studies examined preschoolers' ability to assign verb interpretations to nonsense words encountered in conjunction with novel actions. Experiment 1 examined the ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and younger, normally developing peers to glean a very interpretation when the name of the figure performing the novel action was already known. The two groups of children performed in a similar, accurate fashion. Experiment 2 required preschoolers to rely exclusively on morphosyntactic information to determine whether the novel word represented an object or action. When provided with redundant morphosyntactic cues, children with SLI and language- and age-matched peers succeeded in identifying the novel words that referred to objects but not those that referred to actions. Only the age-matched normal peers were above chance levels when a noun interpretation depended on a single grammatical morpheme (e.g., 'We want the koob' versus 'We want to koob'). The findings suggest that preschoolers, whether or not they have language impairment, have difficulty using morphosyntactic information to bootstrap verbs. Furthermore, redundant but not single morphosyntactic cues facilitate the bootstrapping of nouns.

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This paper presents a case study of a child with specific language impairment who usually omitted the regular past inflection in obligatory contexts yet occasionally over-regularized the past (e.g. *blowed). A treatment approach was employed that permitted a test of one current account of this paradoxical pattern, the filled paradigm' hypothesis. The child's gains over the treatment period did not conform to the predictions of the hypothesis, but rather suggested the possibility that her use of the past tense inflection was related to the phonological properties of the verb stem.

Responding relevantly to an information-soliciting utterance (ISU) is required of a school-age child many times daily. For the' child with pragmatic language difficulties, this may be especially problematic, yet clinicians have had few data to design intervention for improving these skills. This small-scale study looks at the ability of a child with pragmatic language difficulties to respond relevantly to ISUs in relation to variations in ISU complexity. Propositional density, perceptual distance, syntax and vocabulary diversity of the ISU are analysed to determine factors influencing conversational relevance. Results show that decreased propositional density is associated with improved relevance for this child.