First Language

The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like ‘who’ or a complex one like ‘which princess’, and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children’s performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children’s understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both ‘who’ and ‘which’, and the use of synthetic verbal forms.

We elicited the production of various types of relative clauses in a group of German-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls in order to test the movement optionality account of grammatical difficulty in SLI. The results show that German-speaking children with SLI are impaired in relative clause production compared to typically developing children. The alternative structures that they produce consist of simple main clauses, as well as nominal and prepositional phrases produced in isolation, sometimes contextually appropriate, and sometimes not. Crucially for evaluating the movement optionality account, children with SLI produce very few instances of embedded clauses where the relative clause head noun is pronounced in situ; in fact, such responses are more common among the typically developing child controls. These results underscore the difficulty German-speaking children with SLI have with structures involving movement, but provide no specific support for the movement optionality account.

This study used elicited production methodology to investigate the negative sentences that are produced by English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). Negative sentences were elicited in contexts in which adults use the negative auxiliary verb doesn’t (e.g., It doesn’t fit). This form was targeted to see how negative markers (not, n’t) interact with the 3rd person singular -s in the grammars of children with SLI. A robust sample of negative sentences was collected from 63 children: 21 5-year-old children with SLI, 21 language-matched typically-developing children and 21 age-matched typically-developing children. The negative sentences produced by children in the two control groups were consistently adult-like. In contrast, only 5 of the 21 children in the SLI group produced adult-like negative sentences with doesn’t. The other 16 children with SLI produced a variety of non-adult negative sentences (e.g., It not fit, It’s not fit, It not fits, It’s not fits). The study concludes that children with SLI undergo an extended period in the development of sentential negation during which they produce a range of non-adult sentences that are similar to those previously reported in younger 2- to 3-year-old typically-developing children.

A growing body of research with typically developing children has begun to show that the acquisition of grammatical morphemes interacts not only with a developing knowledge of syntax, but also with developing abilities at the interface with prosodic phonology. In particular, a Prosodic Licensing approach to these issues provides a framework for understanding why children’s early use of grammatical morphemes is so variable. This in turn provides a means for making predictions, given the prosodic structure of a particular language and the location of a particular grammatical morpheme, if it is likely to be produced or not. Given that many of the patterns of development found in typically developing children are found in older children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) as well, the Prosodic Licensing Hypothesis should provide a better understanding of some of the variable use of grammatical morphemes found in children with SLI.

This study investigated the performance of school age Greek-speaking children with SLI on verbal short-term memory (VSTM) and Subject–Verb (S-V) agreement in comparison to chronological age controls and younger typically developing children. VSTM abilities were assessed by means of a non-word repetition task (NRT) and an elicited production task, an off-line grammaticality judgment (GJ) task, and an on-line self-paced listening task were employed to examine S-V agreement abilities. The study found significant between-group differences in the NRT and the off-line GJ task. No significant between-group differences were found for the S-V agreement production task and for reaction times of the on-line task. The authors argue that the children with SLI showed increased grammatical sensitivity in S-V agreement and relate their lower performance on the off-line GJ task to the task’s metalinguistic demands. The findings suggest that deficits in VSTM constitute a robust marker for SLI and claim that S-V agreement can be acquired by SLI individuals with apparent limitations in VSTM.

The study investigated morphosyntactic abilities and semantic-pragmatic competence in 24 children with developmental dyslexia aged 7 -12 years. Morphosyntactic abilities were investgated in a direct object clitic production task, semantic-pragmatic competence in a quantifier comprehension task. Children with dyslexia produced fewer clitics than their age controls and vocabulary controls. Ten children with dyslexia scored less than 1.5 SD below the mean score of an additional group of 89 children of the same age, selected across a range of oral and reading abilities. No difference was found in quantifier comprehension. These findings suggest that a large number of children with dyslexia are likely to be affected by SLI, although not diagnosed, and the authors recommend language assessment, including assessment of clitic production, when children are referred for dyslexia. By capitalizing on theories that see SLI as a deficit in the processing of complex aspects of linguistic relations, the authors argue that the production of clitics is particularly challenging because of their syntactic and morphosyntactic complexity.

Language learners have to acquire the phonological grammar of their native language, and different levels of representations on which the grammar operates. Developmental dyslexia is associated with a phonological deficit, which is commonly assumed to stem from degraded phonological representations. The present study investigates one aspect of the phonological grammar, phonological assimilation rules. Specifically, it examines whether dyslexic adults have acquired phonological rules in speech production normally, and whether they compensate for them in perception. Contrary to the ‘degraded phonological representations hypothesis’, these adults produced phonological assimilations, and perceptually compensated for assimilations to the same extent as control participants. This suggests that individuals with dyslexia have acquired the phonological rules of their native language normally, and implies that they must have well-specified phonological representations, at least with respect to the features tested here. Nevertheless, these dyslexic adults still exhibit the typical phonological deficit as measured by phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory and rapid automatic naming tasks. Thus, it is suggested that the explanation for their phonological deficit must lie elsewhere than in their phonological representations and grammar.

Sentence repetition and non-word repetition tests are widely used measures of language processing which are sensitive to language ability. Surprisingly little previous work has investigated whether children’s socio-economic status (SES) affects their sentence and non-word repetition accuracy. This study investigates sentence and non-word repetition using an adaptation of the Grammar and Phonology Screening (GAPS) test. The sample comprised 126 typically-developing Spanish-monolingual Chilean children aged 5;6 from low (n = 65) and high (n = 61) socio-economic status (SES) families. The results revealed that the high SES group scored significantly higher than the low SES group in the sentence repetition task, but there was no group difference for non-word repetition. The high SES group also scored significantly higher on a measure of vocabulary comprehension, and when vocabulary comprehension was taken into account, the group difference in sentence repetition was no longer significant. The authors examine how the differential effect of SES on sentence and non-word repetition might be explained by differences in the language and cognitive mechanisms involved in the two tasks, and discuss the clinical implications of their findings.