Insensitivity to verb conjugation patterns in French children with SLI

Abstract

Specific language impairment (SLI) is characterised by persistent difficulties that affect language abilities in otherwise normally developing children (Leonard, 2014). It remains challenging to identify young children affected by SLI in French. We tested oral production of the passé composé tense in 19 children in kindergarten and first grade with SLI aged from 5;6 to 7;4 years. All children were schooled in a French environment, but with different linguistic backgrounds. We used an Android application, Jeu de verbes (Marquis et al., 2012), with six verbs in each of four past participle categories (ending in -é, -i, -u, and other irregulars). We compared their results and error types to those of control children (from Marquis, 2012-2014) matched for gender, age, languages spoken at home, and parental education. Results show that children with SLI do not master the passé composé in the same way as typical French children do, at later ages than previously shown in the literature. This task shows potential for oral language screening in French-speaking children in kindergarten and first grade, independently of language background.

Identifying Linguistic Markers of French-Speaking Teenagers With Developmental Language Disorder: Which Tasks Matter?

“…These results also support the argument that low scores on standardized tests should not be a criterion to assess disorder severity (Bishop et al, 2017;Breault et al, 2019;Tessier et al, 2017). Future adaptions of English standardized language batteries should take into account linguistic features that are known to be difficult for children with DLD, for instance, subjectverb agreement production, as suggested by our results, or past tense production in regular and irregular verbs (Royle et al, 2018).…”