ABSTRACT

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) acquiring Swedish show greater use of present and past tense inflections than do their German- and Dutch-speaking counterparts. With the addition of newly studied languages, fresh perspectives will likely emerge, which will gradually move us toward a greater understanding of this perplexing disorder. Along with details that existing accounts must handle, there are several new issues emerging in the cross-linguistic literature on SLI that will pose additional challenges to any attempt at explaining the grammatical deficits of children with this disorder. Other accounts of the difficulties with grammatical morphology hold that the phonotactic or prosodic demands of grammatical morphemes are especially troublesome for children with SLI. The children with SLI produced definite as well as indefinite articles in fewer obligatory contexts than both typically developing-mean length of utterance and typically developing-A children. Phonology/prosody accounts also offer a possible explanation for the function word difficulties of Italian- and Spanish-speaking children with SLI.