Morpheme Learning of Children With Specific Language Impairment Under Controlled Instructional Conditions

Abstract

Three groups of children were exposed to instances of a novel morpheme under controlled experimental conditions. The performance of 32 children with specific language impairment (SLI), aged 5:0 to 7:0 years (years:months), was compared to that of 24 normally developing children matched for age and nonverbal ability and 20 younger normally developing children matched for language development and nonverbal ability. The children were taught under two instructional conditions that differed only in whether the child was asked to imitate the new language form after each instance imitation) or just to observe its use (modeling). Consistent with past research (Connell, 1987b), the children with SLI performed significantly better under the imitation condition than under modeling, but the age-matched controls showed no difference in response to instruction. The performance of the language-matched controls was similar to that of the age-matched controls, suggesting that the instruction-specific effect for the children with SLI is not merely a function of general language immaturity. Although the superiority of the imitation condition for the children with SLI was evident for test trials requiring production of the new morpheme (as in past research), no such effect was evident for comprehension trials. This differing effect of output demands suggests that the SLI-specific response to instruction is not a matter of different mastery of the new rule but rather is specific to the need to access the newly induced rule on production trials. The accessing of phonological representations as a possible explanation for the effect is discussed.

Novel Morpheme Learning in Monolingual and Bilingual Children

“…The first studies to examine whether an artificial morpheme learning paradigm would be sensitive to an impairment in the linguistic system in childhood were conducted by Connell (1987) and Connell and Stone (1992). In both studies, children with SLI and children with typical language skills were taught an invented derivational morpheme whereby a suffix (the vowel schwa) was attached to a noun to represent a part of the object denoted by the noun (e.g., book -book-ə).…”

“…A number of follow-up studies to Connell (1987) and Connell and Stone (1992) were published over the past three decades, with the findings generally confirming that children with SLI have difficulty learning novel derivational morphology (Bellaire et al, 1994;Kiernan & Snow, 1999;Ravid et al, 2003), that this difficulty is more pronounced for the more difficult production tasks than for comprehension tasks (Bellaire et al, 1994;Ravid et al, 2003), and that these deficits extend from the preschool to the school-age period (Bellaire et al, 1994). In general, the patterns of findings are consistent and compelling enough across studies to indicate that limited training tasks where children are taught a new derivational morpheme have potential for reliably distinguishing children with language impairment from children without language impairment.…”

“…Using the paradigm developed by Connell et al (Connell, 1987;Connell & Stone, 1992), Roseberry and Connell (1991) tested the acquisition of the part-whole morpheme /-ə/ in Spanish-English bilingual children, who were either acquiring English typically or who were suspected of having SLI. The children were taught the morpheme in the context of English nouns, and their retention of the novel morpheme was tested expressively.…”

“…This task can successfully identify monolingual children with language impairment (Connell, 1987;Connell & Stone, 1992); however, its ability to do so with bilingual populations is not clear (Restrepo, 1998). In order to understand whether the morpheme-learning task can become a useful diagnostic tool in the bilingual assessment process, it is important to examine whether this task is similarly sensitive to typical language abilities in children characterized by different language backgrounds.…”

“…A number of alternatives to standardized assessments have been considered, with limited training tasks gaining prominence as evidence accumulates of their sensitivity to language impairment in both monolingual (Bellaire, Plante, & Swisher, 1994;Connell, 1987;Connell & Stone;1992;Ravid, Levie, & Avivi-Ben Zvi, 2003) and bilingual (Roseberry & Connell, 1991) children. These limited training tasks, where children are exposed to the to-be-learned information briefly and are then tested on their ability to retrieve and apply this information, are clinically appealing because of the ease with which they can be administered, scored, and interpreted.…”