Simulating the Acquisition of Verb Inflection in Typically Developing Children and Children With Developmental Language Disorder in English and Spanish

Abstract

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection. Such difficulties are less apparent in languages with rich verb morphology like Spanish and Italian. Here we show how these differential profiles can be understood in terms of an interaction between properties of the input language, and the child's ability to learn predictive relations between linguistic elements that are separated within a sentence. We apply a simple associative learning model to sequential English and Spanish stimuli and show how the model's ability to associate cues occurring earlier in time with later outcomes affects the acquisition of verb inflection in English more than in Spanish. We relate this to the high frequency of the English bare form (which acts as a default) and the English process of question formation, which means that (unlike in Spanish) bare forms frequently occur in third-person singular contexts. Finally, we hypothesize that the pro-drop nature of Spanish makes it easier to associate person and number cues with the verb inflection than in English. Since the factors that conspire to make English verb inflection particularly challenging for learners with weak sequential learning abilities are much reduced or absent in Spanish, this provides an explanation for why learning Spanish verb inflection is relatively unaffected in children with DLD.

Finiteness marking in Russian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment

“…So, for example, Bortolini et al (1998) have shown that when tested on their use of grammatical morphology, Italian-acquiring children with SLI (age 4;2-6;3) performed significantly better than their English-acquiring counterparts. Similar findings have been reported for a number of other morphological rich languages, such as Hungarian (Lukács et al, 2009), Kannada (Tiwari et al, 2017), and Spanish (Bedore & Leonard, 2005;Freudenthal et al, 2021). Despite the wealth and breadth of research on finiteness marking in SLI crosslinguistically, and although considerable attention has been paid to the investigation of verbal inflectional morphology in TD Russian, to the best of our knowledge, there exists no study directly investigating finiteness marking in monolingual Russian SLI.…”

“…To take it a step further, such a correlation suggests that it may be interesting to explore the Russian SLI data in light of various input-driven accounts of OI errors (see e.g. Freudenthal et al, 2021;Pine et al, 2020, and references therein). We leave such an investigation for future research.…”

“…2. But see, for example, Bedore and Leonard (2005) and Freudenthal et al (2021) for the claim that verbal morphology is relatively intact in Spanish SLI, particularly when compared to English SLI. 3.…”

Morphology in a Parallel, Distributed, Interactive Architecture of Language Production

“…Bybee and Brewer ( 1980 ) have further pointed out that semantic overlap also matters in the expected way: the more similar two forms are in meaning, the more likely they are to influence each other in paradigm leveling. Hoeffner and McClelland ( 1993 ) have shown that parallel activation of morphologically-related forms from shared semantics can also explain the paradigm leveling that occurs in child language acquisition, where children (particularly, those with developmental language delay, previously called specific language impairment) substitute frequent base forms for less frequent inflected forms (see also Freudenthal et al, 2021 ; Harmon et al, 2021 ).…”

Transitivity of Try and V Construction in British and American English

“…The other grammatical property of a verb proposed by Freudenthal, Ramscar, Leonard, and Pine (2021) is that it inflects for tense morphologically. Besides its base form, a verb has at most four inflected forms, formed by adding one of the suffixes to the base form, i.e., +n for the past participle, +d for past tense or past participle, +s for the third person singular present tense, and +ing for progressive.…”