ABSTRACT
School-aged children with specifi c language impairment (SLI) have diffi culties with many areas of language, including particular areas of grammar: verb morphology, syntax, and selection of verb arguments. In terms of verb morphology, they omit the past tense –ed, as in “yesterday I walk_ home” (Rice, Wexler, & Cleave, 1995; van der Lely & Ullman, 2001), the third-person singular –s, as in “he like_ chocolate” (Leonard et al., 2003), and the verb be, as in “I drawing a
picture” (Leonard et al., 2003). In terms of syntax, they have diffi culties comprehending some syntactic structures such as passives (e.g., the fi sh is eaten by the man-Bishop, 1979; van der Lely, 1996) and datives (e.g., give the pig the dog-van der Lely & Harris, 1990). They also have diffi - culties producing questions (Leonard, 1995; van der Lely & Battell, 2003), in particular object wh-questions, making errors such as “what did they drank?” and “who Mrs. Brown see?” (van der Lely & Battell, 2003). In terms of production of argument structure, they omit obligatory verb arguments; for example, “the woman is placing on the saucepan” (Ebbels, 2005; Thordardottir
& Weismer, 2002), and use fewer optional arguments (Ingham, Fletcher, Schelletter, & Sinka, 1998; King, 2000). In addition, they use fewer verb alternations, for example, the girl is opening the door versus the door is opening (Schelletter, Sinka, Fletcher, & Ingham, 1998; Thordardottir & Weismer, 2002), and are more likely to link arguments to incorrect syntactic positions with change-of-state verbs, like fi ll, producing errors such as “the lady is fi lling the sweets into the jar” (Ebbels, Dockrell, & van der Lely, 2007a).
