TY - JOUR
T1 - Morphological Deficits in Children With Specific Language Impairment
T2 - The Status of Features in the Underlying Grammar
AU - Leonard, Laurence B.
AU - Caselli, M. Cristina
AU - Bortolini, Umberta
AU - McGregor, Karla K.
AU - Sabbadini, Letizia
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by NIH Grant DC00458. We thank the many colleagues who provided comments during presen-
PY - 1992/4/1
Y1 - 1992/4/1
N2 - A common profile among specifically-language-impaired (SLI) children acquiring English is a mild to moderate deficit in a range of language areas (lexicon, syntax) and a more serious deficit in morphology. There are several possible accounts of these children's extraordinary difficulty with morphology. In this investigation, we examined the possibility that the features necessary for morphology, such as person and number, are absent from the underlying grammars of SLI children. We approached this question by examining the morphology of both Italian-speaking and English-speaking SLI children, as well as that of two types of control children, one matched according to age, the other according to mean length of utterance. The results suggested that an assumption of features missing from the underlying grammar is not warranted for the children studied here.
AB - A common profile among specifically-language-impaired (SLI) children acquiring English is a mild to moderate deficit in a range of language areas (lexicon, syntax) and a more serious deficit in morphology. There are several possible accounts of these children's extraordinary difficulty with morphology. In this investigation, we examined the possibility that the features necessary for morphology, such as person and number, are absent from the underlying grammars of SLI children. We approached this question by examining the morphology of both Italian-speaking and English-speaking SLI children, as well as that of two types of control children, one matched according to age, the other according to mean length of utterance. The results suggested that an assumption of features missing from the underlying grammar is not warranted for the children studied here.
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U2 - 10.1207/s15327817la0202_2
DO - 10.1207/s15327817la0202_2
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0000815739
SN - 1048-9223
VL - 2
SP - 151
EP - 179
JO - Language Acquisition
JF - Language Acquisition
IS - 2
ER -