What Do Children With Specific Language Impairment Do With Multiple Forms ofDO?

Abstract

Purpose This study was designed to examine the early usage patterns of multiple grammatical functions of DO in children with and without SLI. Children’s use of this plurifunctional form is informative for evaluation of theoretical accounts of the deficit in SLI. Methods Spontaneous uses of multiple functions of DO were analyzed in language samples from 89 children, 37 children with SLI age 5;0–5;6, 37 age-equivalent children, and 15 language-equivalent children, age 2;8–4;10. Proportion correct as well as the types of errors produced were analyzed for each function of DO. Results Children with SLI had significantly lower levels of proportion correct Auxiliary DO use compared to both control groups, with omissions of the DO form as the primary error type. Children with SLI had near-ceiling performance on Lexical DO and Elliptical DO, similar to both control groups. Conclusions Plurifunctionality is not problematic: children acquire each function of DO separately. Grammatical properties of the function, rather than surface properties of the form, dictate whether SLI children will have difficulty using the word. Overall, these results support the Extended Optional Infinitive account of SLI, and the use of difficulty with Auxiliary DO as part of a clinical marker for SLI.

Specific Language Impairment in African American English and Southern White English: Measures of Tense and Agreement With Dialect-Informed Probes and Strategic Scoring

“…Excluding these responses is consistent with the scoring of tense and agreement productivity as operationalized within the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 2001). As noted by Rice and Wexler (2001), children with SLI primarily produce tense and agreement errors of omission (e.g., target verbal -s: Today, he walkØ) rather than errors of commission (e.g., target verbal -s: Today, he can walks; for additional support of this claim, see Cleave & Rice, 1997;Eadie, Fey, Douglas, & Parsons, 2002;Leonard, Bortolini, Caselli, McGregor, & Sabbadini, 1992;Rice, 2003Rice, , 2009Rice & Blossom, 2013;Rice & Wexler, 1996;Rice, Wexler, & Cleave, 1995).…”

The acquisition of tense morphology over time by English second language children with specific language impairment: Testing the cumulative effects hypothesis

“…Tense morphemes that children with SLI find problematic are the following: third person singular – s , he walk -s ; past tense regular, she walk - ed ; past tense irregular, he ran ; BE copula, she is happy ; BE auxiliary, he is running ; and DO auxiliary, Does she walk to school every day? (Bedore & Leonard, 1998; Marchman, Wulfeck, & Ellis Weismer, 1999; Rice & Blossom, 2012; Rice & Wexler, 1996; Rice, Wexler, & Hershberger, 1998; Rice, Wexler, Marquis, & Hershberger, 2000; Rice, Wexler, & Redmond, 1999). As children with SLI proceed through elementary school, their global language abilities remain inferior to age expectations (Tomblin, Zhang, Buckwalter, & O'Brien, 2003); however, the status of tense morphology as a clinical marker changes (Conti-Ramsden, Botting, & Faragher, 2001; Oetting & Hadley, 2009).…”

Language growth and genetics of specific language impairment

“…The third dimension is finiteness, a morphosyntactic property of the grammar. In English, finiteness is manifest in simple clauses by a small set of morphemes that interact with word order in the syntax: Auxiliary and copula BE, auxiliary DO (but not main verb DO (Rice & Blossom, 2013)), - s third person agreement marking, regular and irregular past tense marking. Young English-speaking children tend to omit finiteness markers in clauses where they are required, a phenomenon called an Optional Infinitives Stage (Wexler, 1994, 2003, 2011).…”