Grammaticality judgements in adolescents with and without language impairment

Abstract

Background-Existing evidence suggests that young children with specific language impairment (SLI) have unusual difficulty detecting omissions of obligatory tense-marking morphemes, but little is known about adolescents' sensitivity to such violations.

Morphosyntax in poor comprehenders

“…The second reason is that it was previously unclear whether PCs displayed the same types of morphosyntax difficulties that are characteristic of children with SLI. Our results provide evidence that PCs do have difficulty with some aspects of morphosyntax that have been reported to be difficult for children with SLI, including the detection of omitted finiteness and over-regularization of irregular past tense verbs (Marchman, Wulfeck, & Ellis Weismer, 1999; Rice, Tomblin, Hoffman, Richman, & Marquis, 2004) as well as overt agreement errors and tense agreement errors (Betz, 2005; Miller et al, 2008; Wulfeck et al, 2004; but see Rice et al, 1995). …”

“…First, there is evidence that finiteness-marking difficulties are good early indicators of broader language weaknesses. For example, whereas typically-developing children master finiteness marking in spontaneous speech in the preschool years, children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit finiteness-marking difficulties in spontaneous speech through at least age 8 (Rice, Wexler, & Hershberger, 1998) and in grammatical judgment tasks through adolescence (Betz, 2005; Miller, Leonard, & Finneran, 2008; Rice, Hoffman, & Wexler, 2009; Wulfeck, Bates, Krupa-Kwiatkowski, & Saltzman, 2004). To date, there has been little research aimed at the early identification of PCs, but prediction accuracy based on vocabulary measures alone is low (Elwer, Keenan, Olson, Byrne, & Samuelsson, 2013).…”

Evaluation of Three Proposed Markers for Language Impairment in English: A Meta-Analysis of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies

“…Children with LI start producing tense morphemes later than peers with typical development (TD) and use them less consistently throughout preschool and early elementary school years (Rice, Wexler, & Hershberger, 1998; for a review, see Leonard, 1998). School-age children and adolescents with LI demonstrate poor ability to identify tense errors in grammaticality judgment tasks (Miller, Leonard, & Finneran, 2008;Redmond & Rice, 2001;Rice et al, 2009;Rice, Wexler, & Redmond, 1999).…”

Electrophysiological correlates of rapid auditory and linguistic processing in adolescents with specific language impairment

“…Several different cognitive processes have been shown to be atypical in children with SLI and it is possible that the cumulative effects of these fundamental weaknesses have a profound impact on these children's ability to acquire language in a typical manner. Earlier studies indicate that some of these primary cognitive processes may involve auditory processing, including rapid temporal processing of non-linguistic stimuli (e.g., Basu, Krishnan, & Weber-Fox, 2010; Benasich & Tallal, 2001; Friedrich, Weber, & Friederici, 2004; McArthur, Atkinson & Ellis, 2009; McArthur & Bishop, 2005; Neville, Coffey, Holcomb, & Tallal, 1993; Tallal, 1980; 2000; Wible, Nicol, & Kraus, 2004; 2005), selective auditory attention (Stevens, Sanders, & Neville, 2006), speed of processing for non-linguistic as well as linguistic information (Miller, Leonard, & Finneran, 2008; Miller, Kail, Leonard, & Tomblin, 2001; Miller, Leonard, Kail, Zhang, Tomblin, & Francis, 2006), and processing capacity/working memory (Ellis Weismer, Evans, & Hasketh, 1999; Ellis Weismer, Plante, Jones, & Tomblin, 2005; Leonard, Ellis Weismer, Miller, Francis, Tomblin, & Kail, 2007). …”