Patricia Deevy

Clinical markers for specific language impairment in Italian: the contribution of clitics and non‐word repetition

BACKGROUND The discovery of clinical markers for specific language impairment (SLI) in children can assist in the accurate identification of children with this disorder, and in a description of the disorders phenotype for genetic study. One challenge to this type of research is the fact that languages vary in the most salient symptoms of SLI. This study focuses on Italian. AIMS To determine whether three measures--the use of third-person plural inflections, the use of direct-object clitics and non-word repetition--are successful in distinguishing Italian-speaking children with SLI from their typically developing peers. METHODS & PROCEDURES Eleven preschool-aged children with SLI, 11 same-age typically developing peers and 11 younger typically developing children participated in the study. The third-person plural inflection and direct-object clitic tasks required the children to describe drawings in response to prompts provided by the examiner. In the non-word repetition task, the children repeated non-words ranging from one to four syllables in length. OUTCOMES & RESULTS All three measures proved successful either singly or in combination, with direct-object clitics and non-word repetition showing the highest sensitivity and specificity. CONCLUSIONS Additional research should be pursued to replicate and extend these findings. Along with the potential clinical value of the findings, the results suggest that difficulties with non-final weak syllables--a problem that would adversely affect all three measures--may be an important part of the SLI profile in Italian.

Specific language impairment in Italian: The first steps in the search for a clinical marker

Recent studies of children with specific language impairment (SLI) have identified language measures that seem quite accurate in distinguishing preschool-age children with SLI from their normally developing peers. However, the studies have focussed exclusively on English, and it is clear from the literature that the SLI profile varies between languages. This paper reports on three studies designed to assess the utility of particular language measures for Italian. In the first two studies, it was found that a composite measure based on the use of definite singular articles and third-person plural inflections showed good sensitivity and specificity in distinguishing Italian-speaking children with SLI from their typically developing peers. The third study showed that the same composite can be applied successfully to individual cases of SLI. Some of the additional steps needed to evaluate this composite measure are discussed.

Phonotactic probability and past tense use by children with specific language impairment and their typically developing peers.

A group of preschool‐aged children with specific language impairment (SLI), a group of typically developing children matched for age (TD‐A), and a group of younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD‐MLU) were presented with novel verbs in contexts that required them to inflect with past tense –ed. The novel verbs differed in their phonotactic probabilities. The children with SLI were less likely than the other two groups to produce the novel verbs with –ed. Furthermore, they were less likely to use –ed with novel verbs of low phonotactic probability than those of high probability; this difference was not seen in the other two groups of children. It appears that the phonotactic composition of verbs is one factor that can contribute to the variability of past tense use by children with SLI.

The use of grammatical morphemes reflecting aspect and modality by children with specific language impairment

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have well-documented problems in the use of tense-related grammatical morphemes. However, in English, tense often overlaps with aspect and modality. In this study, 15 children with SLI (mean age 5;2) and two groups of 15 typically developing children (mean ages 3;6 and 5;3) were compared in terms of their use of previously studied morphemes in contexts that more clearly assessed the role of aspect. The childrens use of less frequently studied morphemes tied to modality or tense was also examined. The children with SLI were found to use -ing to mark progressive aspect in past as well as present contexts, even though they were relatively poor in using the tense morphemes (auxiliary was, were) that should accompany the progressive inflection. These children were inconsistent in their use of third person singular -s to describe habitual actions that were not occurring during the time of their utterance. However, the pattern of the childrens use suggested that the source of the problem was the formal tense feature of the inflection, not the habitual action context. The childrens use of modal can was comparable to that of the typically developing children, raising the possibility that the modality function of possibility had been learned without necessarily acquiring the tense feature of this morpheme. These childrens proficiency with can suggests that their bare verb stem productions should probably not be re-interpreted as cases of missing modals. Together these findings suggest that the more serious tense-related problems seen in English-speaking children with SLI co-occur with a less impaired ability to express temporal relations through aspect and modality.

The Production of Passives by Children with Specific Language Impairment Acquiring English or Cantonese.

The production of passive sentences by children with specific language impairment (SLI) was studied in two languages, English and Cantonese. In both languages, the word order required for passive sentences differs from the word order used for active sentences. However, English and Cantonese passive sentences are quite different in other respects. We found that English-speaking children with SLI were less proficient than both same-age and younger typically developing peers in the use of passives, though difficulty could not be attributed to word order or a reliance on active sentences. Cantonese-speaking children with SLI proved less capable than same-age peers but at least as proficient as younger peers in their use of passive sentences. The implications of these cross-linguistic differences are discussed.

Structural priming in children with and without specific language impairment

Primary objective: To determine if structural priming can be demonstrated in young children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Research design: A mixed‐model design was used to compare children with SLI to two groups of typically developing (TD) children, and to compare priming conditions. Methods and procedures: Eighteen children with SLI and 36 TD children (18 matched on age and 18 matched on MLU) participated. Children were asked to describe drawings compatible with both a transitive or an intransitive sentence structure, after being primed with one of the structures. Results: All groups of children were more likely to produce transitive sentences when they had just heard and repeated a transitive prime. Children with SLI did not differ from the other groups. Conclusions: Children with SLI show similar priming effects to TD children. Priming has promise as a method for investigating production factors in typical and atypical language development.

Agreement Checking in Comprehension: Evidence from Relative Clauses

Work on agreement processing in comprehension in English has provided evidence that the plural feature is “specified” or “marked” and that the syntactic structure of the subject plays a role in checking features. It is argued here that the structure intervening between the subject and verb also plays a role in checking and that there is pressure to check features immediately. A self-paced reading study tested this proposal in a previously unstudied configuration: agreement between the verb in a subject relative clause (RC) and the relative clause head (e.g., the niece of the actors who was/were¨). According to the Construal Hypothesis (Frazier and Clifton, 1995), the structural relation between the RC and head is not immediately fully specified (unlike, for example, the relation between the subject and verb of a main clause). Thus, at the point when an agreeing verb is processed, the structure underlying the check may not yet be fully specified. This assumption about structural processing, together with the proposal for agreement checking in comprehension predicts (1) that there will be a large asymmetry between the processing of singular and plural agreeing verbs in the RC (larger than those seen in direct subject-verb predication) and (2) that there could be a role for agreement in determining RC attachment. Clear evidence for the first prediction was found; evidence for the second was inconclusive.

Tense and Aspect in Sentence Interpretation by Children with Specific Language Impairment

The aim of this study was to determine whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) are sensitive to completion cues in their comprehension of tense. In two experiments, children with SLI (ages 4 ; 1 to 6 ; 4) and typically developing (TD) children (ages 3 ; 5 to 6 ; 5) participated in a sentence-to-scene matching task adapted from Wagner (2001). Sentences were in either present or past progressive and used telic predicates. Actions were performed twice in succession; the action was either completed or not completed in the first instance. In both experiments, the children with SLI were less accurate than the TD children, showing more difficulty with past than present progressive, regardless of completion cues. The TD children were less accurate with past than present progressive requests only when the past actions were incomplete. These findings suggest that children with SLI may be relatively insensitive to cues pertaining to event completion in past tense contexts.

Input sources of third person singular -s inconsistency in children with and without specific language impairment.

We tested four predictions based on the assumption that optional infinitives can be attributed to properties of the input whereby children inappropriately extract non-finite subject-verb sequences (e.g., the girl run) from larger input utterances (e.g., Does the girl run? Lets watch the girl run). Thirty children with specific language impairment (SLI) and thirty typically developing children heard novel and familiar verbs that appeared exclusively either in utterances containing non-finite subject-verb sequences or in simple sentences with the verb inflected for third person singular -s. Subsequent testing showed strong input effects, especially for the SLI group. The results provide support for input-based factors as significant contributors not only to the optional infinitive period in typical development, but also to the especially protracted optional infinitive period seen in SLI.

A cross-linguistic study of real-word and non-word repetition as predictors of grammatical competence in children with typical language development

BACKGROUND Although relationships among non-word repetition, real-word repetition and grammatical ability have been documented, it is important to study whether the specific nature of these relationships is tied to the characteristics of a given language. AIMS The aim of this study is to explore the potential cross-linguistic differences (Italian and English) in the relationship among non-word repetition, real-word repetition, and grammatical ability in three-and four-year-old children with typical language development. METHODS & PROCEDURES To reach this goal, two repetition tasks (one real-word list and one non-word list for each language) were used. In Italian the grammatical categories were the third person plural inflection and the direct-object clitic pronouns, while in English they were the third person singular present tense inflection and the past tense in regular and irregular forms. OUTCOMES & RESULTS A cross-linguistic comparison showed that in both Italian and English, non-word repetition was a significant predictor of grammatical ability. However, performance on real-word repetition explained childrens grammatical ability in Italian but not in English. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS Abilities underlying non-word repetition performance (e.g., the processing and/or storage of phonological material) play an important role in the development of childrens grammatical abilities in both languages. Lexical ability (indexed by real-word repetition) showed a close relationship to grammatical ability in Italian but not in English. Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of cross-linguistic differences, genetic research, clinical intervention and methodological issues.