Sensitivity to Verb Phrase Grammatically by Children with Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

8 preschoolers with specific language impairment (age range = 44–58 mo.) and 8 language-matched, typically developing toddlers (22–29 mo.) participated in a verb comprehension task to investigate sensitivity to auxiliary is in four contexts—grammatical (Who is pushing?), omitted (Who pushing?), ungrammatical (Who in pushing?), and nonsense (Who id pushing?). Analysis yielded a significant interaction: children with specific language impairment had the lowest comprehension in the ungrammatical context and typically developing children had the highest. Perhaps children with specific language impairment, but not younger typically developing children, were sensitive to grammatical co-occurrences. One explanation is that knowledge of morphosyntax exceeded production for children with specific language impairment. Moreover, typically developing children may have ignored morpheme anomalies, perhaps benefitting from other input cues or flexible sentence processing.