Production of infinitives by 5-year-old children with language-impairment on an elicitation task

Abstract

The infinitive productions of eight 5-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) on an elicited production task were compared with the infinitive productions of 25 3- to 5-year-old children with normally-developing language (NL). The basic infinitive structure itself did not seem to be a problem for these children since all eight of the children with SLI produced infinitival complements with at least five different main verbs. However, other aspects of infinitive sentences which must be learned as a lexical property of specific verbs appeared to present more difficulty for some of the children with SLI. Individual children with SLI showed limited or no subcategorization for ditransitivity (production of both an NP and an infinitival complement) or for infinitives with a lexical complement subject. In contrast to previous reports, only one of the children with SLI omitted the infinitive marker to more than once. Reference errors were consistent with what has previously been reported for NL children.

Keywords

Complex sentences infinitives language development specific language impairment verb complements

References

Bloom, L. (1970). Language development: form and function in emerging grammars. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .

Bloom, L. , Tackeff, J. & Lahey, M. (1984). Learning to in complement constructions . Journal of Child Language, 11, 391-406 .

Bowerman, M. (1973). Early syntactic development: A cross-linguistic study with reference to Finnish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .

Bowerman, M. (1979). The acquisition of complex sentences. In P. Fletcher & M. Garman (Eds), Language Acquisition (pp. 285-305). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .

Chomsky, C. (1969). The acquisition of syntax from 5 to 10. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .

Conti-Ramsden, G. & Jones, M. (1997). Verb use in specific language impairment . Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 40, 1298-1313 .

Eisenberg, S. L. (1989). The development of infinitives by three-, four-, and five-year-old children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, City University of New York.

Eisenberg, S. (1997). Investigating children’s language: A comparison of conversational sampling and elicited production . Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26, 519-538 .

Eisenberg, S. (2003). Production of infinitival object complements in the conversational speech of 5-year-old children with language-impairment . First Language, 23, 327-341 .

10.

Eisenberg, S. L. & Cairns, H. S. (1994). The development of infinitives from three to five . Journal of Child Language, 21, 713-734 .

11.

Fletcher, P. , Ingham, R. , Schletter, C. & Sinka, I. (1997). The effect of verb semantics on syntax in children with specific language impairment . Poster presented at the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorder, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

12.

Johnston, J. R. & Kamhi, A. G. (1984). Syntactic and semantic aspects of the utterances of language impaired children: The same can be less . Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 30, 65-85 .

13.

Jones, M. & Conti-Ramsden, G. (1997). A comparison of verb use in children with SLI and their younger siblings . First Language, 17, 165-193 .

14.

King, G. (2000). Verb complementation in language impaired school age children. In Michelle Aldridge (Ed.), Child language (pp. 84-91). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters .

15.

Lee, L. L. (1974). Developmental sentence analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press .

16.

Leonard, L. (1972). What is deviant language? Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 37, 427-446 .

17.

Leonard, L. B. (1998). Children with specific language impairment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .

18.

Leonard, L. B. , Eyer, J. A. , Bedore, L. M. & Grela, B. G. (1997). Three accounts of the grammatical morpheme difficulties of English-speaking children with specific language impairment . Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 40, 741-753 .

19.

Leonard, L. B. , Miller, C. & Gerber, E. (1999). Grammatical morphology and the lexicon in children with specific language impairment . Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 42, 678-689 .

20.

Limber, J. (1973). The genesis of complex sentences. In T. E. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language (pp. 169-186). New York: Academic Press .

21.

Menyuk, P. (1964). Comparison of grammar of children with functionally deviant and normal speech . Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 7, 109-121 .

22.

Miller, J. F. & Chapman, R. S. (1981). The relation between age and mean length of utterance in morphemes . Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 24, 154-161 .

23.

Oetting, J. B. , Rice, M. L. & Swank, L. K. (1995). Quick incidental learning (QUIL) of words by school-age children with and without SLI . Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38, 434-445 .

24.

Rice, M. L. & Bode, J. V. (1993). GAPS in the verb lexicons of children with specific language impairment . First Language, 13, 113-131 .

25.

Rice, M. L. & Wexler, K. (1996). Towards tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English-speaking children . Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 39, 1239-1257 .

26.

Skipp, A. (2000). Verb learning in children with specific language impairment . Poster presented at the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorder, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

27.

Thordardottir, E. T. & Ellis Weismer, S. (2001). High frequency verbs and verb diversity in the spontaneous speech of school-age children with specific language impairment . International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 36, 221-244 .

28.

Tomasello, M. (1992). First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .

29.

Watkins, R. V. , Rice, M. L. & Moltz, C. C. (1993). Verb use by language-impaired and normally developing children . First Language, 13, 133-143 .