Production and Processing of Subject–Verb Agreement in Monolingual Dutch Children With Specific Language Impairment

Blom, Elma; Vasić, Nada; Jong, Jan de

doi:10.1044/2014_jslhr-l-13-0104

Cited by 25 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Children with DLD appear more likely to succeed in producing past tense -ed when the stem ends in a liquid (e.g., pulled) than when it ends in a stop or continuant (e.g., closed) (Oetting andHorohov 1997, Owen et al 2015). A similar pattern is attested in Dutch, where children with DLD are more likely to produce third-person singular (-t) inflections when the verb stems end with sonorants than when they end with fricatives or plosives (Blom et al 2014).…”

Section: Factor 3: the Power Of Prosodysupporting

confidence: 55%

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Five overarching factors central to grammatical learning and treatment in children with developmental language disorder

Leonard

Kueser

2019

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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Background During grammatical treatment of children with developmental language disorder (DLD), it is natural for therapists to focus on the grammatical details of the target language that give the children special difficulty. However, along with the language‐specific features of the target (e.g., for English, add –s to verbs in present tense, third‐person singular contexts), there are overarching factors that operate to render the children's learning task more, or less, challenging, depending on the particular target. Aims To identify five such factors that can play a role in the grammatical learning of children with DLD. We use English as our example language and provide supporting evidence from a variety of other languages. Main Contribution We show that the relative degree of English‐speaking children's difficulty with particular grammatical details can be affected by the extent to which these details involve: (1) bare stems; (2) opportunities for grammatical case confusion; (3) prosodic challenges; (4) grammatical and lexical aspect; and (5) deviations from canonical word order. Conclusions During treatment, therapists will want to consider not only the English‐specific features of grammatical targets but also how these more general factors can be taken into account to increase the children's success.

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Section: Factor 3: the Power Of Prosodysupporting

confidence: 55%

“…A similar pattern is attested in Dutch, where children with DLD are more likely to produce third‐person singular (– t ) inflections when the verb stems end with sonorants than when they end with fricatives or plosives (Blom et al . ).…”

Section: Factor 3: the Power Of Prosodymentioning

confidence: 97%

Five overarching factors central to grammatical learning and treatment in children with developmental language disorder

Leonard

Kueser

2019

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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“…For example, an especially serious weakness in English and other Germanic languages is the area of grammatical morphology, including grammatical inflections (Blom et al . 2014; de Jong 1999; Leonard et al . 1997; Rice et al .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Production of noun suffixes by Turkish‐speaking children with developmental language disorder and their typically developing peers

Güven

Leonard

2020

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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Background: Turkish has a rich system of noun suffixes, and although its complex suffixation system may seem daunting, it can actually present a learning opportunity for children. Despite its unique features, Turkish has not been studied extensively, especially in the case of children with language deficits, such as developmental language disorder (DLD). Most of the extant studies are focused on bilingual children, and the results are somewhat mixed. Aims: To focus on the noun morphology system of Turkish-speaking preschoolers with DLD and compare their use with that of two groups of typically developing (TD) children. Moreover, to investigate the nature of their noun suffix errors in detail. Methods & Procedures:We report data from a total of 80 monolingual children, 40 children with DLD (age range = 4;0-7;10), 20 TD age-matched children (4;0-7;3) and 20 younger mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched children (2;0-4;3). The data for this study came from language samples obtained from children in individual clinical assessment sessions.Outcomes & Results: The children with DLD made less use of noun suffixes than both the younger and the age-matched TD children. The use of the unmarked (nominative case) form in place of an overt suffix was the most likely error by all groups. Suffix-change alternations required beyond vowel harmony seemed to pose real problems for these children.Conclusions & Implications: These results suggest that even when a language appears to provide significant advantages for the learning of noun morphology, children with DLD do not succeed in closing the gap. Certain factors such as morphophonological changes beyond vowel harmony, multiple allomorphs for the same suffix type and accusative suffixes that are not uniformly applied in the adult input were found to be significant predictors of the DLD group's difficulty with noun suffixes. Because these same factors can serve as characteristics of other languages, a child's difficulties might seem to be language specific (e.g., a particular allomorph in the language), but may actually be based on a broader difficulty (e.g., dealing with multiple allomorphs for the same suffix). Accordingly, factors that transcend a single language should be considered during clinical assessment and therapy. What are some of the clinical applications of this study?r For clinicians who work with Turkish-speaking children with DLD, priority should be given to morphophonology. These children would benefit from treatment that focuses on how to attach different allomorphs to different open-class words. Because factors such as morphophonological complexity operate in other languages, the findings have broader clinical implications. In particular, regardless of the target language, clinicians should consider the possibility that these broader factors, rather than language-specific details, are the basis for a child's difficulty.

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“…A similar disregard for subject-verb agreement was established by Blom & Vasić (2012) in a self-paced listening task with 5-year-olds. This may suggest a production-comprehension asymmetry.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subject interpretation of object questions by Dutch 5-year-olds

Metz

Hout

Lely

2012

AVT

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We investigated the interpretation of Dutch wie 'who'-and welke 'which'-questions in Dutch 5-year-olds. In contrast to wh-questions in many languages, Dutch wh-questions are structurally ambiguous between a subject and an object reading. We used test items in which the ambiguity was resolved by number agreement. The participants (N = 20) heard a wh-question and had to choose the corresponding picture out of a set of four; this method revealed their interpretation as either subject or object question. The results show that 5-year-olds interpret all question types as subject questions, independent of the agreement cues. Thus, they effectively do not attend to the agreement mismatch that this interpretation causes for the object questions. These errors suggest an overly strong subject-first bias in 5-year-olds. We argue that number agreement is too weak a cue for children to overcome this tendency.

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Production and Processing of Subject–Verb Agreement in Monolingual Dutch Children With Specific Language Impairment

Cited by 25 publications

References 39 publications

Five overarching factors central to grammatical learning and treatment in children with developmental language disorder

Five overarching factors central to grammatical learning and treatment in children with developmental language disorder

Production of noun suffixes by Turkish‐speaking children with developmental language disorder and their typically developing peers

Subject interpretation of object questions by Dutch 5-year-olds

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