Transcript The syntactic abilities of children with SLI

The syntactic abilities of
children with SLI:
From Tense to Movement
37-975-01
Challenges to Language Acquisition:
Bilingualism and Language Impairment
Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Bar Ilan University
Topics
Tense and Agreement
 Passive
 Binding
 WH-Questions
 Relative clauses

Tense as a clinical
marker for SLI
The use of Root/Optional
Infinitives
The phenomenon



Up to the age of three children use the infinitival
form of the verbs in indicative matrix clauses in
50% of their verbal utterances in English (Wexler
1994), and to a lesser extent in other languages
(Armon-Lotem 1996a, Hyams 1995, Rhee &
Wexler 1995, Rizzi 1994a).
Finite sentences are produced at the same time
Children seem to know the grammatical
properties of finiteness and non-finiteness (e.g.,
Deprez & Pierce 1994)
1)
a. It only write on the pad
b. He bite me
c. My finger hurts
2)
M: ma at osa?
what you do
'what are you doing ?
L: tapuax lishtot (Lior)08;1
apple to-drink
'I drink an apple'
Infinitival forms constitute only 5% of the Italian
data.
>>> Extensive use of root infinitives correlates with
non-null subject languages.
 “A language goes through an OI stage if and
only if the language is not an INFL-licensed nullsubject language.” (Wexler 1996(

Armon-Lotem (1996) for Hebrew



There’s a gradual increase in the use of inflected
verbs.
Past tense morphology is acquired prior to
person morphology, but this does not correlate
with a decrease in the use of root infinitives, but
rather with a decrease in the use of “stem-like
forms”.
The use of root infinitives reduces (from 5% to
less than 1%) only when questions (and
subordination) are mastered (last stage of Klima
& Bellugi 1966).
Inflections in Hebrew speaking
children with SLI




Dromi, E. & S. Davidson. 2002. A Clinical Marker for HSLI: from
Empirical Findings to Theorizing. Paper presented at Brain and
Language: Language Acquisition in Special Populations, Bar Ilan
University, June.
Dromi, E., Leonard, L., Adam, G. & Zadunaisky-Ehrlich, S. 1999.
Verb Agreement Morphology in Hebrew-Speaking Children with
Specific Language Impairment. Journal of Speech, Language and
Hearing Research, 42, 1414-1431.
Dromi, E., Leonard, L.B., & Adam, G. 1997. Evaluating the
morphological abilities of Hebrew- speaking children with SLI.
Amsterdam Series in Child language Development, 6, 65-78,
Dromi, E., L. B. Leonard, and M. Shteiman (1993) The grammatical
morphology of Hebrew-speaking children with Specific Language
Impairment: some competing hypotheses. Journal of Speech and
Hearing Research 36: 760-771
The morphological richness
hypothesis

SLI children have a limited processing capacity.
They focus on the most salient aspects of the
language they acquire. For example, in English
they focus on word-order and ignore the
morphology, while in German they focus on
morphology and ignore the word order.

Subjects: SLI, NDA, NDL (matched by MLU)
Dromi, E., L. B. Leonard, and M.
Shteiman (1993)


Findings: “Hebrew speaking children with SLI
resembled their MLU controls in their use of both
present and past tense inflections requiring
agreement with the subject”.
In the nominal system, plural formation,
adjectival agreement, and the use of the
accusative case marker are all delayed, but not
different from language matched controls.
>>> SLI is a delay
Dromi, E., Leonard, L., Adam, G. &
Zadunaisky-Ehrlich, S. (1999)
Method:
 Sentence completion for 3rd person.
Enactment tasks for 1st and 2nd person.
 4 conjugations: pa'al, piel, hitpael, hif'il.
The inflectional paradigm for past and
present.
Findings
In present tense, both SLI and NDL used past for preset
 In present tense, both SLI and NDL used masculine for feminine in singular
and plural.
 SLI found Hitpa'el more difficult – using p'iel instead. Simplifying consonants
cluster.
 SLI found Hif'il more difficult – using present for past and vice versa, using
infinitives.
 SLI found pi'el more difficult – they used also stripped forms
 In past tense, 3rd person singular replaced many of the inflected forms.
 SLI used it mostly instead of other singular forms (56/64) – mostly for 2nd
person
 NDL used it mostly instead of plural forms.
 Past tense does pose a problem for Hebrew speaking SLI children, whereas
difficulties with present tense are less pronounced.
 Most errors were mostly related to the use of tense (60/144)) or person
(67/144), but usually not both.
 Most errors were different by one feature from the target (77% in the past
tense)
>>> A limited processing capacity, since more complex structures, which place
more demands on the system, seem to be more impaired.

Blass A. 2000.
Method: Spontaneous speech samples of the same
children
Findings:
 No difference between SLI and NDL in the level of
inflections
 No difference between SLI and NDL in the mastery of
inflections
 Out of all forms in Pa’al (80% of verbs), 90% were
tensed.
 SLI used more bare (stripped) forms – significant, but the
numbers are small.
 SLI and NDL had similar errors, but SLI had more.
 In natural settings children do what they know and avoid
the difficult forms.
>>>Delay
Davidson, S. 2002. The Language Profile of
Hebrew Speaking Preschoolers with Specific
Language Impairement. M.A. Thesis, TAU.
Methodology: H-IPSyn
Findings: SLI are similar to NDL but for three criteria:



Lexicon - SLI use a smaller variety of verb types than
NDL
Mrpho-syntax - SLI make more errors than NDL but of
the same kind
Pragmatic (??)- SLI have difficulties with reference not
found in the NDL group
Passive Participle vs. Regular Past
Tense
Laurence B. Leonard, Patricia Deevy, Carol A. Miller, Leila
Rauf, Monique Charest, and Robert Kurtz. 2003.
Surface Forms and Grammatical Functions: Past Tense
and Passive Participle Use by Children with Specific
Language Impairment. Journal of Speech, Language,
and Hearing Research Vol.46 43-55
The girl pushed the boy.
The boy got pushed by the girl.

EOI account: different

The surface account: same
Method
Subjects
12 of the children (aged from 4,6 to 6, 10) with
SLI
 12 ND-A
 12 ND-MLU

Sentence completion tasks:
 the use of past tense verb forms
 the use of passive participle verb forms
Summary


The inconsistency with which children with SLI
produce past –ed cannot be due to the surface
property of this inflection. Its grammatical function
probably plays the central role.
Children with SLI have special problems with verb
morphology, even when tense is not involved. The
passive participle –ed proved to be one such area
of weakness.
The syntactic abilities of
children with SLI:
The Passive
Passive
Maryi was kissed ti by John






Passive is A-movement rather than A’-movement
The subject is the patient (no necessary agent)
The transitive verb has unique morphology (with or
without an auxiliary verb) which makes it intransitive
The passive derives n-place predicate from n+1-place
predicate
Not all languages permit an agent-phrase (by phrase),
and the same agent-phase can occur with non-passive
verbs
Verbal vs. adjectival passive
Issues in acquisition
Reversible vs. non-reversible
 Actional vs. non-actional
 Adjectival vs. Verbal >>
 Do children understand the by-phrase?
 Comprehension vs. Production >>

Verbal vs. adjectival
The girl is covered (by the boy)
The covered girl (*by the boy)
Ha-yalda mexusa (al yedey ha-yeled)
the-girl cover-pass (on hands the-boy)
‘The girl is covered (by the boy)’
<<
SLI Children's Delayed Acquisition
of Passive
Mabel L. Rice, Kenneth Wexler, & Jennifer
Francois
Paper Presented at the BU Conference on
Language Development
Boston, MA, November 1-4, 2001
Subjects

Study 1
 19
10-year-old children
 17 age-equivalent controls
 16 8-year-old lexically-equivalent controls (PPVT raw
scores)

Study 2
 17
5-year-old SLI children
 17 age-equivalent controls
 16 3-year-old lexically-equivalent controls (PPVT raw
scores)
Method
Stromswold’s 32-item task for reversible full
passives, with toy animals.
Examiner: “The goal kicked the
horse.”
Child: act out action with toy
animals
[Verbal item set: Kiss, slap, touch, hug, kick,
lick, tickle, push]
Results - Study 1
Passive Comprehension
Percent Correct
0.9
0.75
0.6
0.45
0.3
0.15
0
SLI
Lexically Matched
Age Matched
By 10 years of age, children in the SLI group
comprehended reversible full verbal passives, showing
knowledge of movement (A-chains)
Results - Study 2
Passive Comprehension: Identification of Agent
Percent Correct
0.9
0.75
0.6
0.45
0.3
0.15
0
SLI
Lexically Matched
Age Matched
At 5 years of age, children in the SLI group were below age
peers in their comprehension of reversible full verbal passives,
and similar to their younger lexically-equivalent peers
How do children with SLI interpret
the passive?




Children with SLI consistently interpret reversible
passive using SVO strategy (Bishop 1982)
Children with SLI show a mixture of correct
interpretation and a reversal interpretation (Van
der Lely & Harris 1990)
Children with SLI perform better on short
passive than on long Passive (Van der Lely
1994)
Children with SLI adopt an adjectival
interpretation (Van der Lely 1996)
Van der Lely, H. 1996. Specifically language
impaired and normally developing children:
Verbal passive vs. adjectival passive
interpretation. Lingua, 98, 243–272.
Subjects
Method – TAPS (Picture
selection task)




(a) reversible active SVO (e.g.,
“the man eats the fish”);
(b) reversible full passive (e.g.,
“the man is eaten by the fish”);
(c) short progressive passive
(e.g., “the fish is being eaten”);
and
(d) short passive with
potentially adjectival passive
interpretation (e.g., “the fish is
eaten”).
12 items x 4 sentence types =
48 sentences
6 verbs: wash,
mend, paint, eat,
cut, hit
Results (p.258)
Reversal
Adjectival
Passive
p. 259
Adjectival
Passive
D. V. M. Bishop, P. Bright, C. James, S. J.
Bishop, and H. K. J. Van der lely. 2000.
Grammatical SLI: A distinct subtype of
developmental language impairment ?
Applied Psycholinguistics 21, 159–181
Subjects
Sample A - LI - 46 children out of 37
same-sex twin pairs selected for the
presence of language impairment in one
or both twins
 Sample B - LN- 32 children out of an
unselected sample of 104 twin pairs from
the general population
 All children were 7 - 13.

Results



There was a significant difference between
groups: mean correct (out of 48) for group LI =
40.4 (SD = 3.96) and for group LN = 45.3 (SD =
2.29), F(1, 76) = 39.8, p < .001.
Age was not significantly correlated with TAPS
performance, r(76) = −.047
Nonverbal ability was significantly correlated
with TAPS : r(76) = .420 for Raven’s Matrices
and .445 for PIQ (both p < .001
Results by sentence type
*
*
The Acquisition of Passive
Constructions in Russian
Children with SLI
Maria Babyonyshev, Lesley Hart, & Elena
Grigorenko. 2005. Paper presented at
Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics The Princeton Meeting
Subjects



A medium-sized village (population of
approximately 900) in Arkhangelsk region where
the incidence of language disorders is far
greater than in the general population.
14 monolingual Russian children aged between
6;3 and 9;10 (mean age 7; 10), non-verbal IQ
above 70: seven TD children (mean age 8;3 )
and seven children with SLI (mean age 7;5).
Children were grouped based on: clinical
impressions, and either MLU, or syntactic
complexity (the proportion of syntactically
complex structures to all structures produced)
Method


A picture selection task with reversible passive sentences in the
perfective form.
20 passive sentences with pairs of pictures: 10 based on actional
verbs (a), 5 based on psychological predicates (b), and 5 based on
perception verbs (c).
a. Petux byl oščipan gusem.
‘A rooster was plucked by a goose.’
b. Lisa byla utešena korovoj.
‘A fox was consoled by a cow.’
c. Žiraf byl obnyuxan obez’janoj.
‘A giraffe was smelled by a monkey.’
Results - percentage of success
Actional Psychological Perception Total
TD* 77%
71%
80%
76%
SLI 71%
57%
40%
56%
* Younger TD do not distinguish the three types of
passives, performing at chance level on all of them (see
Babyonyshev & Brun 2003).
Is this universal?


Leonard, L. B., Wong, A. M. Y, Deevy, P., Stokes, S. F.,
and P. Fletcher .2006. The production of passives by
children with specific language impairment: Acquiring
English or Cantonese. Applied Psycholinguistics 27,
267–299
English – movement, one-to-many often reduced
morpheme, adjectival/verbal confusion,
Cantonese – movement, no morphology, bei with a
contrastive tone which is unique to passive
English
Cantonese
“The findings necessitate a modification of the
assumptions of the sparse morphology
hypothesis, and provide only partial support for
the surface account. The English get-passives
and the Cantonese passives employed in this
study differ in their structure but both require
some type of movement. However,we found no
evidence that movement was at the heart of the
children’s difficulties. If optional movement is a
correct characterization, then we must assume
that our tasks increased the likelihood that an
available but optional movement operation was
selected by the children with SLI."
The syntactic
abilities of children
with SLI: Binding
Johni shaved himselfi
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
John likes himself
John likes him
He likes John
*Himself likes John
John thinks that Bill likes him
He thinks that Bill likes John
John thinks that Bill likes himself
Binding conditions
A: anaphors must be bound in their local domain
B: pronouns must be free in their local domain
C: R-expressions are always free


The coindexation resembles A-movement, but
no theta role transmission is involved
The binding local domain varies across
languages
Issues in acquisition
Which words are pronouns and which are
reflexives.
 What the local domain is.
 Principle A vs. principle B.
 Comprehension vs. production

Solan (1987( – Act-out task, 37
children, ages 4-7.
Sentences
1. The dog said that the horse hit himself
2. The dog said that the horse hit him
3. The dog told the horse to hit himself
4. The dog told the horse to hit him
% correct
95%
49%
82%
36%
5. The dog found the horse’s picture of himself
6. The dog found the horse’s picture of him
85%
7. The dog said that the horse found the picture of himself
8. The dog said that the horse found the picture of him
9. The dog told the horse to find the picture of himself
10. The dog told the horse to find the picture of him
86%
1%
38%
68%
23%
Chien & Wexler (1990) – Pictures
selection, 150 children, ages 2;6-6;6
This is Goldilocks; this is Mama bear.
Is Mama bear touching herself/her?


Children older than 5 obey principle A.
Younger children allow non-local
antecedent: Goldilocks = herself
Children seem to violate principle B
even after 6;6
But



Children obey principle B at the same age that
they obey principle A, but violate a pragmatic
principle which governs the choice of reference
(Reinhart 1983, 1986).
Coreference is possible without coindexing on a
pragmatic basis (contrastive stress). Children
who are not sensitive to contrastive stress would
seem to violate principle B ( McDaniel 1992)
Grice’s principles of cooperation (maxim of
manner) – use the most precise way to say what
you want to say - use him only when you do not
mean himself. This is hard for children
(Grodzinsky & Reinhart 1993)
Binding in SLI



Franks, S. L., Connell, P. J. 1996. Knowledge of
Binding in Normal and SLI Children. Journal of
Child Language, 23, 431-64
Reflexives
NL - pass through a long-distance binding stage
LI - behave like very young NL requiring the
nearest available noun phrase to be the
antecedent.
Bishop et al. 2000. Grammatical SLI: A distinct subtype of
Applied ?developmental language impairment
Psycholinguistics 21, 159–181
Advanced Syntactic Test of Pronominal
Reference (Figure 2, A)
“Baloo Bear says Mowgli is tickling him”
 “Baloo Bear says Mowgli is tickling himself” (X)
 “Mowgli says Baloo Bear is tickling him” (S)

Results
LI 18.72 (SD=2.90)
LN 21.41 (SD=2.53)
(t = 5.61, p < .001).
The syntactic abilities of
children with SLI:
WH-Questions
Questions in English


Yes/no questions are marked only by subject-auxiliary
inversion, i.e., an overt syntactic change in word order in
which the auxiliary is raised into C. Do-support operates
when there is no auxiliary is the declarative.
[Spec, CP] is the target for overt Wh-movement both in
matrix and embedded clauses, with subject-auxiliary
inversion in matrix clauses, but not in embedded clause.
Do-support operates when there is no auxiliary is the
declarative.
a. What did the child see?
b. The teacher wondered what the child saw .
Stromswold, K. 1995. The acquisition of
subject and object wh-questions .

Longitudinal study of 12 children in CHILDES.

Who and what are acquired almost simultaneously,
around age 2;5. Object questions are acquired at the
same age or earlier than subject questions .

All children asked at least one long distance object
question (mean age 2;10), but only one child asked a
long distance subject question (at 5;0).
By the age of 2;6

TD children use wh-movement properly

TD children do not show problem with whnon-local dependency

TD children have no problem with thetagovernment
Wh-Errors in Leonard Corpus of
Children with SLI
1 Which one I can do? (C ‘Which one can I do?)
2. What Kent’s gonna play with? (C ‘What’s Kent gonna play with?)
3. How you knowed? (E ‘How did you know?’)
4. What he did? (F ‘What did he do?’)
5. What you doing? (E ‘What are you doing?’)
6. What this for? (G ‘What is this for?’)
7. How much we got to do? (J ‘How much have we got to do?’)
8. How you get this out? (A ‘How d’you get this out?’)
9. What this do? (A ‘What’s this do?/What does this do’)
10. How open it up? (B ‘How d’you open it up?’)
11. What say? (B ‘What d’you say?’)
12. Where go on? (B ‘Where’s it go on/Where does it go on?’)
13. How much long gonna be? (A ‘How much longer’s it gonna be?’)
14. These do? (C ‘What do these do?’)
15. What is this is? (H ‘What is this?’)
Wh-movement in children with
grammatical SLI: A test of the
RDDR hypothesis
Van der Lely HKJ and Battell J (2003) ,
Language 79: 153-181


SLI subjects fail to master the syntax of the two
types of movement operation involved in whquestions (preposing a wh-expression and
preposing an auxiliary).
This is the result of difficulties they have in
processing non-local dependencies.
Subjects
15 SLI subjects aged from 11;3 to 18;2
 12 TD (typically developing) grammarmatched children aged from 5;3 to 7;4
 12 TD (typically developing) vocabularymatched children aged from 7;4 to 9;1

Method
Wh-questions containing who, what and
which by getting the subjects to play a
version of the board game Cluedo:
Prompt
Mrs Peacock saw someone in the lounge. Ask me who
Mrs Brown placed something in the library. Ask me what
Professor Plum wore a coat. Ask me which one
Target response
Who did Mrs Peacock see in the lounge?
What did Mrs Brown place in the library?
Which coat did Professor Plum wear?
Findings
No errors
AUX errors only
WH errors only
WH and AUX errors
Types of error produced by the subjects
SLI subjects
Younger TD controls
0/15 (0%)
6/12 (50%)
3/15 (20%)
4/12(33%)
0/15 (0%)
1/12 (8%)
12/15 (80%)
1/12 (8%)
Older TD controls
12/12 (100%)
0/12 (0%)
0/12 (0%)
0/12 (0%)
Wh-errors
(a)
(b)
(c)
Who Miss Scarlett saw somebody? (Response to ‘Miss
Scarlet saw someone in the lounge. Ask me who’ – the
target response being Who did Miss Scarlet see in the
lounge?)
Which Reverend Green open a door? (Response to
‘Reverend Green opened a door. Ask me which one’ –
the target response being Which door did Rev. Green
open?).
What did Colonel Mustard had something in his pocket?
(Response to ‘Something was in Colonel Mustard’s
pocket. Ask me what’ – the target response being What
was in Colonel Mustard’s pocket?).
Summary of findings


SLI subjects have far more problems with the
syntax of wh-questions than language-matched
TD controls.
The pattern of errors made by the SLI subjects
differs from the pattern of errors made by the TD
subjects:
 Most
SLI subjects have problems with both auxiliaries
and wh-expressions
 Most TD subjects have problems with neither, or only
with auxiliary inversion .
Can it account for auxiliary
inversion errors?
1.
2.
3.
What cat Mrs White stroked?
What did they drank?
Who Mrs Brown see?
The Uninterpretable Feature Deficit
Model (Tsimpli and Stavrakaki
1991)




SLI children have problems with movement operations,
because these are driven by uninterpretable features.
Chomsky (2006) argues that wh-movement is driven by
an interpretable edge feature on C which (in an
interrogative clause) attracts an interrogative whexpression to move to the edge of CP
Pesetsky and Torrego (2001) argue that auxiliary
inversion is driven by an uninterpretable tense feature on
C which attracts a tensed auxiliary to move from T into
C.
Can UFDM account for why the SLI children in the
Leonard corpus show perfect performance on whmovement but perform much more poorly on auxiliary
inversion .
Other topics: From
Singleton to Exhaustive:
the Acquisition of WhRoeper, T., Schulz, P., Pearson, B. Z. &
Reckling, I. (2006). From singleton to
exhaustive: The acquisition of wh-.
Proceedings of SULA 2005 Conference
(Semantics of Understudied Languages),
Buffalo NY.
Who is eating what?
Double wh-question - Paired answer
Who is wearing a hat?
Exhaustive answer, singleton answer, plural answer
The [+variable] Feature
Necessary in order to recognize
exhaustivity
 Specificity: relating to pre-established
elements in the discourse

 +Specific
= - variable = singleton,
 -Specific = +variable = exhaustive/paired.

Child’s initial default assumption:
Questions are specific in nature
Results

All children pass through a singleton stage around age
4-5.

Singleton readings in four-year-olds:
 English 79%, German 52%

Exhaustive responses
 Age 5: German 80%, English 27%
 Age 6: German 85%, English 75%
 Age 7: German 84%, English 74%

Plural responses: 6%
The syntactic abilities of
children with SLI:
Relative Clauses
Types of complex clauses




Complement clauses – I want to drink, I
know that she is late
Coordinate clauses – I like juice and she
likes water
Adverbial clauses – I went to sleep when
we got home
Relative clauses – The man who Mary
saw was funny
Relative clauses
The girli that John kissed ti is nice
Relative clauses involve an A'-movement
which yields coindexation of an NP in the
main clause with a gap in the embedded
clause, through an operator.
 The operator carries the theta-role of its
trace/gap
 subject vs. object


Some languages have resumptive
pronouns in RCs
ha-yalda she dani nishek ota nexmada
the-girl that Dani kissed her nice
'The girl that Dani kissed is nice'
Types of relative clauses

Subject RC
 The
man who _ reads the book is my friend
 I saw the man who _ read my book
 ‫האיש ש_קרא את הספר הוא ידידי‬
 ‫פגשתי את האיש ש_קרא את הספר‬

Object RC
 The
man who David saw _ is my friend
 I met the man who David saw _
 ‫האיש שדויד ראה _ הוא ידידי‬
 _ ‫פגשתי את האיש שדויד ראה‬
The head external analysis
(Chomsky 1977, Jackendoff 1977,
Partee 1975)








The man [CP whoi [C 0 ] [IP Mary loves ti]] is my friend
The man [CP Opi [C that] [IP Mary loves ti]] is my friend
The man [CP Opi [C 0 ] [IP Mary loves ti]] is my friend
The head noun is base-generated outside CP
The operator undergoes A'-movement to [Spec CP]
The relative clause is right adjoined to the head noun
The head noun and CP are combined via predication
Resumptive pronouns are either base generated (a nonmovement analysis) or traces spell out (a movement
analysis).
Issues in acquisition
Production vs. comprehension
 Resumptive NPs
 Subject vs. object

Production of relative clauses by
TD
children
Children produce preconjunctional relative clauses even before the

age of 2:
a.
*ze regel koevet lax
this foot-fm hurts-fm you
'This is the foot that hurts you'
[Lior 1;10;08]
b. *ze shaon ose tuktuk
this clock does ticktock
'This is a clock that goes ticktock' [Leor 2;1]

The complementizer appears around 2-2;6
aviron she la-shamayim
[Lior 2;01;27]
airplane that to-the-sky
'an airplane that flies to the sky'
Which dog is happy?
Reem Bshara
Resumptive pronouns and
resumptive NPs


Children initially use resumptive pronouns in
French, English an other languages
Children use resumptive NPs
 The


zebra who the man sat next to the zebra.
The non-movement approach (cf. Labelle 1988,
1990, 1996, Goodluck & Stojanoviç 1996)
The movement approach (cf. Law 1992, PérezLeroux 1995, Guasti & Shlonsky 1995,
McDaniel, Bernstein & McKee 1997, Varlokosta
1997a).
Resumptives and Wh-Movement in the
Acquisition of Relative Clauses in Modern
Greek and Hebrew
Varlokosta & Armon-Lotem (1998)
24 monolingual Hebrew-speaking children from 2;8 to 5;5
Dependency
S
DO
IO
PP
Number
55
44
38
40
+cl/pronoun
*13 (24%)
41 (93%)
38 (100%)
33 (83%)
-cl
42 (76%)
2 (5%)
RNP
*1 (2%)
*3 (7%)
*4 (10%)
Comprehension and Production of
relative clauses by children with
SLI

Novogrodsky, R., & Friedmann, N. 2006. The
production of relative clauses in SLI: A window to
the nature of the impairment. Advances in SpeechLanguage pathology, 8(4).
Novogrodsky & Friedmann (2006)
18 Hebrew-speaking children with SLI,
aged 9;3 to 14;6 years (mean =12;6).
 28 TD children divided into three
subgroups: 8 (7 years old), 13 (9 years
old), and 7 (10 years old).
 13 participated in the preference task, and
16 participated in the picture description
task (11 participated in both tasks).

Picture selection
Preference (Adif) - SR
Preference (Adif) - OR
Findings






Children with S-SLI have difficulties in the production of relative
clauses, especially in object relatives that were mainly related to
thematic role assignment.
Age is not a factor in the production of relative clauses in that age
range. Their production was either identical or virtually the same
with no significant difference in both tasks.
In the preference task the S-SLI children produced significantly
fewer target object relatives than the control group (60% compared
to 94%), and significantly fewer subject relatives (94%compared to
99%).
In the picture description task the S-SLI children produced
significantly fewer target object relatives than the control group (46%
compared to 94%), and significantly fewer subject relatives
(83%compared to 98%). (See figure 3).
The children used a variety of structures in order to provide a taskappropriate response without using the impaired syntactic abilities.
The non target responses in both tasks included thematic errors and
reduction of thematic roles, avoidance of movement from object
position, relative head doubling and production of simple sentences
without a relative clause.
No complementizers were omitted.