Morphosyntactic weaknesses in Developmental Language Disorder: the role of structure and agreement configurations

Abstract

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as well as Typically Developing (TD) children, are sensitive to the same hierarchical and locality factors that characterise agreement in adult grammars. This sensitivity holds even though DLD children show accrued difficulties in more complex agreement configurations. In the first experiment, a forced-choice task was used to establish whether children are more affected in the computation of S-V agreement when an element intervenes hierarchically or linearly in the agreement relation: DLD children are more subject to attraction errors when the attractor intervenes hierarchically, indicating that DLD children discriminate between hierarchical and linear configurations. The second experiment, also conducted through a forced-choice task, shows that the computation of agreement in DLD children is more ‘fragile’ than in TD children (and also in children with a primary impairment in the phonological domain), in that it is more sensitive to the factors of complexity identified in Moscati and Rizzi's (2014) typology of agreement configurations. To capture the agreement pattern found in DLD children, we put forth a novel hypothesis: the Fragile Computation of Agreement Hypothesis. Its main tenet is that DLD children make use of the same grammatical operations employed by their peers, as demonstrated in Experiment 1, but difficulties increase as a function of the complexity of the agreement configuration.

Language impairments in children with developmental language disorder and children with high-functioning autism plus language impairment: Evidence from Chinese negative sentences

“…This proposal is consistent with findings in other studies. Children with DLD speaking inflection-rich languages show enormous difficulties in morphosyntactic agreement on features ( Clahsen et al, 1997 ; Moscati et al, 2020 ). Therefore, impairments in agreement relation seem to be ubiquitous among children with DLD, and feature agreement appears to be a locus of their difficulties.…”

“…Agreement relationship is a locus of grammatical weakness in the DLD group ( Clahsen et al, 1997 ; Tsimpli and Stavrakaki, 1999 ; Moscati et al, 2020 ). Deficits in feature agreement are striking characteristics of the DLD group’s difficulties with negative structures ( Kunnari et al, 2014 ).…”

Some notes on language, memory and bilingualism

“…The question concerning a deficit related to language hierarchy is empirical and has rarely been addressed. However, this question has been tackled in a recent study by Moscati et al (2020). In a grammaticality judgement task, children were presented with sentences requiring the establishment of an agreement relation between the subject and the verb, as in (1):(1) a.…”

Vocabulary Abilities and Parents’ Emotional Regulation Predict Emotional Regulation in School-Age Children but Not Adolescents With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

“…Although there is a consensus that most difficulties in children with DLD are presented in syntax and morphology (Van Der Lely, 1998;Van Der Lely et al, 2004;Moscati et al, 2020), other components such as vocabulary difficulties are also well-defined in this population. In fact, different studies have shown difficulties in the different skills needed to learn new vocabulary such as the ability to store and retrieve new words.…”