AI Article Synopsis
- The study investigates whether the extended optional infinitive hypothesis is applicable to Afrikaans-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and whether tense marking can serve as a clinical indicator of SLI in this language.
- The research involved analyzing tense morphology in three groups: 15 Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI (6 years old), 15 typically developing (TD) 4-year-olds, and 15 TD 6-year-olds, through both elicitation and spontaneous speech.
- Results indicated that children with SLI performed similarly to 4-year-olds on sentence completion tasks but produced fewer correct tense morphemes in spontaneous speech compared to both TD groups, reinforcing the idea that tense marking could be a useful clinical marker for
Article Abstract
Purpose: To establish whether the predictions of the extended optional infinitive (EOI) hypothesis (Rice, Wexler, & Cleave, 1995) hold for the language of Afrikaans-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and whether tense marking is a possible clinical marker of SLI in Afrikaans.
Method: Production of tense morphology was examined in 3 groups of Afrikaans-speaking children-15 with SLI who were 6 years old, 15 typically developing (TD) 4-year-olds matched on mean length of utterance, and 15 TD 6-year-olds-using both elicited and spontaneously produced verb forms.
Results: On the sentence completion task, children with SLI fared on par with 4-year-olds and worse than age-matched peers. However, in terms of spontaneous production of morphemes pertaining to tense, children with SLI fared worse than both TD groups. Furthermore, children with SLI mostly made the same types of errors as 4-year-olds, although some errors were unique to the SLI group. Most errors entailed omissions, of modal and temporal auxiliaries as well as of copula be.
Conclusion: The errors offer support for the EOI hypothesis. Tense marking has the potential to be a clinical marker of SLI in Afrikaans, but further research with larger groups of Afrikaans-speaking children, including children of other ages, is needed to confirm this.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2009/07-0286) | DOI Listing |
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