Subject–verb agreement and phonological processing in developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI): a closer look

Rispens, Judith; Been, P.

doi:10.1080/13682820600988777

Cited by 60 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Previous research on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement in TD Dutch shows that children generally correctly express verbal agreement from the moment they begin to produce two-word utterances, between the ages of 2 and 3 (Blom 2003). As for Dutch-speaking children with SLI, it is well known that they experience problems producing correctly inflected finite verbs de (de Jong 1999;Rispens & Been 2007). Whereas TD children no longer produce root infinitives (i.e., mama lopen 'mommy walk') by age 3 (Blom 2003), children with SLI continue to do so until the age of 8 (Wexler, Schaeffer & Bol 2004).…”

Section: Personmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic and Cognitive Abilities in Children with Specific Language Impairment as Compared to Children with High-Functioning Autism

Schaeffer

2016

Language Acquisition

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Link to publication Citation for published version (APA):Schaeffer, J. (2018). Linguistic and other cognitive abilities in children with Specific Language Impairment as compared to children with High-Functioning Autism. Language Acquisition, 25(1), 5-23. DOI: 10.1080DOI: 10. /10489223.2016 General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. University of Amsterdam ABSTRACTThis study investigates the question as to whether and how the linguistic and other cognitive abilities of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) differ from those of children with High-Functioning Autism (HFA). To this end, 27 Dutch-speaking elementary-school-age children with SLI, 27 age-matched children with HFA, and a control group of 27 age-matched Typically Developing (TD) children were experimentally tested on various components of grammar, pragmatics, and nonverbal cognition. Prima facie, the results suggest a resemblance between SLI and HFA in their lower-than-TD performance on pragmatics. However, the children with SLI perform significantly weaker than the TD children on grammar and several cognition tests, while the children with HFA do not. It is concluded that, despite their initial resemblance in terms of pragmatics, children with SLI have profoundly different profiles from children with HFA in terms of grammar and nonverbal cognition and can thus not be considered as instantiations of the same continuum, as proposed by Bishop (2010).

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Section: Personmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic and Cognitive Abilities in Children with Specific Language Impairment as Compared to Children with High-Functioning Autism

Schaeffer

2016

Language Acquisition

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“…Our study has targeted number agreement, but it is unlikely that the grammatical problems of deaf readers will be limited to this domain. Looking beyond the deaf population, our study, along with other recent research (Rispens & Been, 2007;Oakhill, Cain & Bryant, 2003), forces us to consider the possibility that grammatical knowledge is an important contributor to reading success and that problems with grammatical knowledge could also contribute to literacy impairment in other populations, for example in dyslexia. Intervention studies should be performed to test whether training that targets morphological relationships at the level of sentence processing will move levels of literacy forward in deaf learners.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…For example, monitoring for agreement errors is disrupted by a cognitive load more than monitoring for problems with word order or local plural agreement (e.g. two boys/one boy; McDonald, 2008), subject verb agreement is specifically disrupted in specific language impairment and dyslexia (Rice & Oetting, 1993;Rispens and Been, 2007;Leonard, Bortolini, Caselli, McGregor & Sabbadini, 1992), and acquisition of tense and number agreement is relatively late compared to other function morphemes (Brown, 1973;Menyuk, 1969;Cazden, 1968).…”

Section: Subject-verb Number Agreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agreeing to Disagree: Deaf and Hearing Children's Awareness of Subject–Verb Number Agreement

Breadmore

Krott

Olson

2014

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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This study investigated deaf adolescents' implicit and explicit awareness of subject–verb number agreement. In Experiment 1, a self-paced reading task, the reading times of deaf and hearing children (matched for reading and chronological age, mean = 8;3 and 13;10 years) increased when sentences contained disagreeing subject–verb number markers. However, deaf adolescents' slowing occurred later in the sentence than it did in both groups of hearing children. The same deaf adolescents were unable to detect and correct subject–verb agreement errors in Experiment 2, whereas both groups of hearing children performed well on this task. Thus, deaf adolescents demonstrated implicit awareness of agreement in the absence of explicit knowledge. Moreover, this nascent awareness was below that expected on the basis of their (substantially delayed) reading ability. Therefore, grammatical difficulties could be a significant impediment to deaf children's literacy. Future research should examine whether this is a result of late or incomplete learning of English, bilingualism, or another factor.

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“…One area that is typically influenced by the impairment is morphosyntax and the ability to comprehend and produce grammatical morphemes. These grammatical morphemes include those that indicate tense, number marking and subject-verb agreement (Rice, Wexler & Cleave 1995;Clahsen, Bartke & Göllner 1997;de Jong 1999;Wexler, Schaeffer & Bol 2004;Rispens & Been 2007;Spoelman & Bol 2012). For example, Clahsen et al (1997) compare 9 Englishspeaking children with SLI to 6 German-speaking children with SLI aged between 5 and 8 years old on subject-verb agreement and tense.…”

Section: Specific Language Impairmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We know from previous studies that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulties with the comprehension and production of grammatical morphemes. For example, Dutch-speaking children with SLI have been shown to have problems with subject-verb agreement or finiteness both in judgment (Rispens & Been 2007) and in production (de Jong 1999;Wexler, Schaeffer & Bol 2004). Less is known about the difficulties that children with SLI experience with morphology in the nominal domain (but cf.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The mass-count distinction in Dutch-speaking children with specific language impairment

Witteloostuijn

Schaeffer

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This study reports experimental data on the acquisition of the mass-count distinction by Dutch-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). While verbal morphosyntax is known to be impaired in SLI, nominal morphosyntax has received less attention. The mass-count distinction provides an interesting test ground: count can have a plural morpheme: bal-en ('balls'), but mass cannot: *deeg-en ('doughs'). Flexible nouns can easily occur in either mass or count syntax (pizza/pizza-s). Finally, object-mass nouns (e.g. furniture) are syntactically mass, but quantify over individuals, and are hypothesized to have a lexical [+individual] feature (Bale & Barner 2004). Typically developing (TD) Dutch-acquiring children become sensitive to the mass-count distinction around age 6 (van Witteloostuijn 2013).Hypothesizing that the primary impairment of SLI is in morphosyntax, and not in lexical-semantics, we predict that Dutch-speaking children with SLI older than 6 have most problems with the interpretation of flexible nouns (relying solely on morphosyntax), some problems interpreting classical count and mass nouns (supported by convention/world knowledge), and least problems interpreting object-mass nouns (relying solely on their lexical [+individual] feature).Quantity judgments based on count and mass nouns were collected from 28 Dutch children with SLI aged between 6 and 14 years old and 28 individually age-matched TD children. Confirming our predictions, the children with SLI scored significantly lower than their TD controls on flexible nouns, and, albeit to a lesser extent, on classical nouns. This underscores the (nominal) morphological deficit in SLI. In contrast, no difference between groups was found on object-mass nouns.

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Subject–verb agreement and phonological processing in developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI): a closer look

Cited by 60 publications

References 25 publications

Linguistic and Cognitive Abilities in Children with Specific Language Impairment as Compared to Children with High-Functioning Autism

Linguistic and Cognitive Abilities in Children with Specific Language Impairment as Compared to Children with High-Functioning Autism

Agreeing to Disagree: Deaf and Hearing Children's Awareness of Subject–Verb Number Agreement

The mass-count distinction in Dutch-speaking children with specific language impairment

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