Noun phrase morphology in Swedish-speaking children with specific language impairment

Abstract

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are often described as having great difficulty with grammatical morphology, but most studies have focused only on these children's use of verb morphology. In this study, we examined the use of noun phrase (NP) morphology by preschool-age children with SLI who are acquiring Swedish. Relative to typically developing same-age peers and younger peers matched according to mean length of utterance, the children with SLI had greater difficulty in the use of genitive inflections, indefinite articles, and article + adjective + noun constructions. Their difficulties were evidenced in omissions as well as substitutions. Furthermore, article omissions were more frequent in NPs containing an adjective and a noun than in NPs with only a noun. These findings indicate that in languages such as Swedish, NP morphology as well as verb morphology can be quite problematic for children with SLI. Factors that might have contributed to these children's difficulties are the lack of transparency of the gender of Swedish nouns, the morphological complexity of NPs containing adjectives in Swedish, the weak syllable status of articles, and the consonantal nature of some of the inflections.

Assessment of specific language impairment in Swedish

“…The second research question was whether the children with SLI selected are representative of children with this diagnosis. Based on the results presented here, together with the results from the same children presented in other studies (6,7,18), we suggest that they are: already at the outset the children were ensured to follow the exclusionary criteria and to follow the inclusionary criteria as well (the results from the LuMat). Closer scrutiny of the results from the assessments does not contradict this.…”

“…This means that although the language matching was based on MLU, the two groups performed at comparative levels on both general grammatical production (the LuMat) and on language comprehension (the SIT). This is interesting, given the ndings that the children with SLI lag behind the MLU controls on several grammatical structures, for example the use of copula and past tense forms (6,7) and in the use of genitive ¼s, inde nite articles and gender marking in noun phrases (18). From a clinical point of view, however, the difference between the children with SLI and the age-matched controls is the most relevant.…”

BempenorBemben: Differences Between Children At-Risk of Dyslexia and Children With SLI on a Morpho-Phonological Task

“…Plural formation has been shown to be poorer in children at risk of dyslexia (e.g., Elbro, Borstrøm, & Petersen, 1998). It has also been shown to be delayed in children with SLI when compared to their age-matched peers (e.g., Conti-Ramsden, 2003;Leonard et al, 1997; or language-matched peers (e.g., Leonard, Bortolini, Caselli, McGregor, & Sabbadini, 1992;Leonard et al, 1997;Windsor, Scott, & Street, 2000) but it is relatively intact compared to other areas of morphological inflection (Bishop, 1994;Clahsen, Rothweiler, & Woest, 1992;Leonard, Salameh, & Hansson, 2001;Marshall, 2004;. Based on these findings, at-risk and SLI groups are expected to have more difficulties with plural marking than a control group.…”

The French noun phrase in preschool children with SLI: morphosyntactic and error analyses

“…In French and other languages, one problem is that late talkers, who will eventually resolve their developmental delay, are often hard to distinguish from children who truly have a persistent linguistic impairment (Bates & Goodman, 1997; Paul, 1991; Thal, Tobias & Morrison, 1991; see also Desmarais, 2007, Demarais, Sylvestre, Meyer, Bairati & Rouleau, 2008, and Ellis & Thal, 2008, for systematic literature reviews on late talkers, mainly learning English). In addition, studies of French language development in pre-school children (Elin Thordardottir & Namazi, 2007; Le Normand, Leonard & McGregor, 1993; Royle & Elin Thordardottir, 2008) reveal few differences between normal and impaired language development on spontaneous-speech measures that have previously been useful in distinguishing children with SLI from normally developing children in other languages, such as English, Spanish, or Swedish (Leonard, Salameh & Hansson, 2001; Restrepro, 1998; Rice & Wexler, 1996). …”

“…producing * la agua for el agua ‘det.m/f water’ ‘the water’), or omitting them (Restrepro & Gutierrez-Clellen, 2001). Swedish-speaking children aged 4 ; 3 to 5 ; 7 show difficulties with genitive - s and plural - er marking on nouns (all errors were omissions), determiner omissions, and gender substitutions with determiners and adjectives (neuter for uter gender or vice versa) in the noun phrase (Leonard et al , 2001). Finally, a subgroup of Italian-speaking children aged 4 ; 2 to 10 ; 7 show high levels of determiner omission in obligatory contexts (Bottari, Cipriani, Chilosi & Pfanner, 2001).…”