ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews the status of grammatical morphology in children with specific language impairment (SLI) who are acquiring other languages. Several cross linguistic generalisations can be made about the use of grammatical morphology by children with SLI. For many English-speaking children with SLI, grammatical morphology represents an area of special difficulty. The term 'specific language impairment' is applied to children who exhibit a significant deficit in language ability yet display normal hearing, age-appropriate scores on tests of nonverbal intelligence, and no obvious signs of neurological damage. A group of children with SLI, 4-7 years of age, were studied along with two comparison groups. One group consisted of normally developing (ND) children matched with the children with SLI according to age. The other group consisted of younger ND children, who were matched with the children with SLI according to a language measure such as mean length of utterance (MLU).