Morphological Deficits in Children With Specific Language Impairment: The Status of Features in the Underlying Grammar

TLDR

Children with specific language impairment typically show mild to moderate deficits in lexicon and syntax, but a more severe deficit in morphology, and multiple theories have been proposed to explain this difficulty. The study examined whether morphology‑related features such as person and number are absent from the underlying grammars of SLI children. The authors compared morphological performance of Italian‑ and English‑speaking SLI children with two control groups matched by age and by mean length of utterance. Results indicated that missing morphological features in the underlying grammar are not supported for the children studied.

Abstract

A common profile among specifically-language-impaired (SLI) children acquiring English is a mild to moderate deficit in a range of language areas (lexicon, syntax) and a more serious deficit in morphology. There are several possible accounts of these children's extraordinary difficulty with morphology. In this investigation, we examined the possibility that the features necessary for morphology, such as person and number, are absent from the underlying grammars of SLI children. We approached this question by examining the morphology of both Italian-speaking and English-speaking SLI children, as well as that of two types of control children, one matched according to age, the other according to mean length of utterance. The results suggested that an assumption of features missing from the underlying grammar is not warranted for the children studied here.