Identifying risk for specific language impairment with narrow and global measures of grammar.

In this study, we ask (1) whether measures of the developmental level of the tense/agreement morphemes used by children have diagnostic value, as has been found for tense/agreement consistency; and (2) whether global measures of accuracy can be applied to children four and five years of age. The spontaneous speech samples of 112 four- and five-year-olds with specific language impairment (SLI) or typical language were analyzed. Group differences were seen for the developmental level of the children's tense/agreement morpheme use, but diagnostic accuracy did not reach acceptable levels, in contrast to a measure of tense/agreement consistency applied to the same data. A global measure of grammatical accuracy was found to be useful, but more appropriate for screening children already viewed as at risk for language difficulties. These findings suggest that an extended period of tense/agreement inconsistency may be more central to SLI than alternative measures related to tense/agreement morphology.

Subordinate clause comprehension and tense/agreement inconsistency in children with specific language impairment.

UNLABELLED: Several recent studies have suggested that the production errors of children with specific language impairment (SLI) such as The girl singing may be explained by a misinterpretation of grammatical adult input containing a similar structure (e.g., The boy hears the girl singing). Thirteen children with SLI and 13 younger typically developing children with comparable sentence comprehension test scores (TD-COMP) completed a comprehension task to assess their understanding of sentences involving a nonfinite subject-verb sequence in a subordinate clause such as The dad sees the boy running. TD-COMP children were more accurate on subordinate clause items than children with SLI despite similar performance on simple transitive (e.g., The horse sees the cow) and simple progressive (e.g., The cow is eating) items. However, no relationship was found between the SLI group's specific subordinate clause comprehension level and their specific level of auxiliary is production, casting some doubt on this type of structure as a source for inconsistent use of auxiliary is. LEARNING OUTCOMES: The reader will learn that children with specific language impairment (SLI): (1) have difficulty understanding complex sentences that include nonfinite subject-verb sequences; (2) that this difficulty is apparent in comparison to younger typically developing peers who have similar scores not only on a sentence comprehension test, but also on simple sentences that correspond to the component parts of the complex sentences; and (3) that this weakness is concurrent with these children's inconsistent use of auxiliary is in production. Although novel verb studies show a clear connection between how children with SLI hear new verbs and how they use them, we do not yet have evidence that this connection is tied to a poor understanding of the input sentences that house the verbs.