Verb inflection in German-learning children with typical and atypical language acquisition: the impact of subsyllabic frequencies

Ott, Susan; Höhle, Barbara

doi:10.1017/s030500091200027x

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Clahsen, Bartke, & Göllner, 1997; Conti-Ramsden, Botting, & Faragher, 2001; Hoover, Storkel, & Rice, 2012; Oetting & Horohov, 1997; Rice & Wexler, 1996). Similar problems have also been well documented in other Germanic languages, with differences across persons of the verbal paradigms (for Dutch: Blom, Vasić, & de Jong, 2014; de Jong, 1999; Duinmeijer, 2016; for Swedish: Hansson, Nettelbladt, & Leonard, 2000; for German: Ott & Höhle 2013; Rice, Noll, & Grimm, 1997). Agreement impairments have also been documented in Hebrew-speaking children with DLD (Dromi, Leonard, Adam, & Zadunaisky-Ehrlich, 1999) and for third person singular morphemes in Arabic (Abdalla & Crago, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 61%

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

et al. 2020

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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.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 61%

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

et al. 2020

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“…Ott and Höhle () found phonotactic frequency effects in the use of the third‐person singular inflection in German. In this case, the effects were found by comparing accuracy when the inflection was combined with a stem ending in a high‐frequency short vowel plus consonant sequence versus a stem ending in a low‐frequency long vowel plus consonant sequence.…”

Section: Factor 3: the Power Of Prosodymentioning

confidence: 99%

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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“…Children with SLI find it especially Past tense -ed omissions in SLI difficult to learn verb stems with low phonotactic probabilities, and this in turn may impact on affixation. A recent study also observed a similar effect in German-speaking children with SLI (Ott & Hoehle, 2013) A further account proposed by moves away from phonotactics to investigate the role of syllable structure. The authors argue that children with G-SLI have difficulties producing branching constituents, e.g.…”

Section: Explanatory Accountsmentioning

confidence: 56%

Past tense –ed omissions by children with specific language impairment: The role of sonority and phonotactics

Riches

2015

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

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Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) frequently omit past tense -ed. Omission rates are subject to phonological context. Two phonological characteristics were manipulated; the sonority profile of the stem-final phoneme plus affix, and the phonotactic probability of the word-final phonemes (/i:pt/ in beeped). Seventeen children with SLI (mean age 6;7) and 21 language-matched children (mean age 4;8) repeated sentences containing regularly inflected verbs according to a 2 (sonority) by 2 (phonotactic legality) design. Affix omissions were analysed. There was a significant effect of sonority only, characterised by a difficulty with level-sonority clusters, and no interaction. Syllabic affixes, e.g. head-ed, were produced relatively accurately. It is argued that -ed omissions in SLI may reflect a low-level speech or articulation difficulty which surfaces in uniquely challenging clusters. This is not an alternative to morphosyntactic accounts; rather past tense omissions are best explained according to complexity in multiple domains; syntactic, morpho-syntactic and phonological.

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Verb inflection in German-learning children with typical and atypical language acquisition: the impact of subsyllabic frequencies

Cited by 7 publications

References 46 publications

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

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

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

Past tense –ed omissions by children with specific language impairment: The role of sonority and phonotactics

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