Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T20:08:58.045Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Grammatical errors in specific language impairment: Competence or performance limitations?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

D. V. M. Bishop
D. V. M. Bishop*
Affiliation:
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
*
MRC Applied Psychology Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, England
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Speech samples from twelve 8- to 12-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) were analyzed. The feature deficit hypothesis maintains that SLI children may produce morphological markers (e.g., plural -s) correctly, but they do not appreciate their role in marking grammatical features. Rather, they treat them as meaningless phonological variants. Findings from the present study were incompatible with this hypothesis: (a) production of morphological markers was not random; errors were unidirectional, in almost all cases involving omission of an inflection in an obligatory context; (b) overregularization errors were sometimes observed; (c) grammatical features differed in difficulty; (d) substitution of stems for inflected forms occurred with irregular as well as regular verbs; and (e) errors of pronoun case marking were common and always involved producing an accusative form in a context demanding the nominative. Children who used a specific inflectional form correctly in some utterances omitted it in others, suggesting a limitation of performance rather than competence. There were few obvious differences between utterances that did and did not include correctly inflected forms, though there was a trend for grammatical errors to occur on words that occurred later in an utterance. It is suggested that slowed processing in a limited capacity system that is handling several operations in parallel may lead to the omission of grammatical morphemes.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , October 1994 , pp. 507 - 550
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, C., & Bishop, D. V. M. (1989). Conversational characteristics of children with semantic-pragmatic disorder. I. Exchange structure, turntaking, repairs and cohesion. British Journal of Disorders of Communication, 24, 211–239.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1987). Competition, variation, and language learning. In MacWhinney, B. (Ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition (pp. 157–193). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bishop, D. V. M. (1983). Test for Reception of Grammar. Published by the author and available from Age and Cognitive Performance Research Centre, University of Manchester, M13 9PL, England.Google Scholar
Bishop, D. V. M., & Adams, C. (1990). A prospective study of the relationship between specific language impairment, phonological disorders and reading retardation. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 31, 1027–1050.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bishop, D. V. M., & Adams, C. (1991). What do referential communication tasks measure? A study of children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 12, 199–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bishop, D. V. M., & Adams, C. (1992). Comprehension problems in children with specific language impairment: Literal and inferential meaning. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 35, 119–129.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clahsen, H. (1989). The grammatical characterization of developmental dysphasia. Linguistics, 27, 897–920.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H. (1991). Child language and developmental dysphasia: Linguistic studies in the acquisition of German. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., Rothweiler, M., Woest, A., & Marcus, G. (1992). Regular and irregular inflection in the acquisition of German noun plurals. Cognition, 45, 225–255.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Connell, P. (1986). Teaching subjecthood to language-disordered children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 29, 481–492.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fletcher, P. (1992). Sub-groups in school-age language-impaired children. In Fletcher, P. & Hall, D. (Eds.), Specific speech and language disorders in children (pp. 152–163). London: Whurr.Google Scholar
Francis, W. N., & Kuçera, H. (1982). Frequency analysis of English usage. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Gopnik, M. (1990). Feature blindness: A case study. Language Acquisition, 1, 139–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gopnik, M., & Crago, M. (1991). Familial aggregation of a developmental language disorder. Cognition, 39, 1–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haegeman, L. (1991). Introduction to government and binding theory. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hurst, J. A., Baraitser, M., Auger, E., Graham, F., & Norell, S. (1990). An extended family with a dominantly inherited speech disorder. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 32, 352–355.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaltenbacher, E., & Lindner, K. (1991). Some aspects of delayed and deviant development in German children with specific language impairment. In Mjaavatn, P. E. (Ed.), Proceedings of the conference on child language disorders (Report No. 24, pp. 216–231). Roros: Norsk Senter for Barncforskning, Trondheim, Norway.Google Scholar
Kolk, H. H. J., & Van Grunsven, M. M. F. (1985). Agrammatism as a variable phenomenon. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2, 347–384.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lahey, M., Liebergott, J., Chesnick, M., Menyuk, P., & Adams, J. (1992). Variability in children's use of grammatical morphemes. Applied Psycholinguistics, 13, 373–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lapointe, S. G. (1985). A theory of verb form use in the speech of agrammatic aphasics. Brain and Language, 24, 100–155.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leonard, L. B. (1979). Language impairment in children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 25, 205–232.Google Scholar
Leonard, L. B. (1989). Language learnability and specific language impairment in children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10, 179–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leonard, L. B., Bortolini, U., Caselli, M. C., McGregor, K. K., & Sabbadini, L. (1992). Morphological deficits in children with specific language impairment: The status of features in the underlying grammar. Language Acquisition, 2, 151–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leonard, L. B., McGregor, K. K., & Allen, G. D. (1992). Grammatical morphology and speech perception in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 35, 1076–1085.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leonard, L. B., Sabbadini, L., Leonard, J. S., & Volterra, V. (1987). Specific language impairment in children: A cross-linguistic study. Brain and Language, 32, 233–252.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leonard, L. B., Sabbadini, L., Volterra, V., & Leonard, J. S. (1988). Some influences on the grammar of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 39–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lindner, K., & Johnston, J. R. (1992). Grammatical morphology in language-impaired children acquiring English or German as their first language – A functional perspective. Applied Psycholinguistics, 13, 115–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., & Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 57).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masterson, J. J., & Kamhi, A. G. (1992). Linguistic trade-offs in school-age children with and without language disorders. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 35, 1064–1075.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Panagos, J. M., & Prelock, P. A. (1982). Phonological constraints on the sentence productions of language-disordered children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 25, 171–177.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pinker, S. (1991). Rules of language. Science, 253, 530–535.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van der Lely, H. J. K. (1994). Canonical linking rules: Forward vs. reverse linking in normally developing and specifically language impaired children. Cognition, 51, 29–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wechsler, D. (1974). Manual of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children – Revised. New York: Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar