ABSTRACT
Brown (1973) was among the first researchers to advocate the view that the relative frequency in which a morpheme is supplied in obligatory contexts is a solid measure for determining the level of its mastery by young children (see also Cazden, 1968). Throughout the years, the practice of collecting and analyzing spontaneous language samples that document natural conversations between children and adults has become one of the most common research practices in the study of language development by normally developing (ND) children and by children with specific language impairments (SLI). A methodological alternative to that of recording spontaneous language samples is that of designing a probe that directs the child to the retrieval of a certain target form. In probed data, as in natural language samples, the metric used to gauge ability is the percentage of correct use in obligatory contexts. This chapter provides an overview of published findings on the use of Hebrew verb forms during elicited tasks, as well as a report of new results on the spontaneous use of morphological inflections by Hebrew-speaking children with SLI (HSLI children).
