This paper reviews the literature on grammatical knowledge in language comprehension in the preschool years from the perspective of sensitivity to structural contrasts. Studies of both direct and indirect evidence of sensitivity to structural contrasts were evaluated and showed that there may be a developmental sequence of increasing sensitivity…

This study examined the productivity and representation of past-tense marking by 11 6-year-old children with and 22 children without specific language impairment (SLI). Patterns of past-tense marking as a function of a word's phonological composition and inflectional frequency were the same for the SLI children and the 11 control children matched…

This study explored the relationship between sentence disruptions and the length and complexity of sentences spoken by 26 typical children developing grammar. For most children, disrupted sentences tended to be longer and more complex than fluent sentences and the magnitude of the differences in length and complexity was positively correlated with…

Evaluation of the grammatical morphology used by 50 preschool children with specific language impairment as a function of their lexical diversity found their use of finite-verb morphology (based on number of different verbs used) and noun-related morphology lagged behind expectations in comparison to a group of normally developing preschoolers.…

This study examined the acquisition of verb particles and prepositions in language-impaired, language-matched, and age-matched preschool children (total n=42). Results indicated that the use of verb particles constituted a particularly challenging task for the language-impaired subjects relative to both the age-matched and language-matched peers.…

This study evaluated the accuracy of automated methods of grammatical categorization ("tagging") of transcribed conversational language samples from 30 normally developing children. On a word-by-word basis, automated accuracy levels averaged 95.1%; accuracy of tagging whole utterances averaged 77.7%. Results suggest that further improvement of…

The language transcripts of seven children with Down syndrome (DS) and seven typically developing children with comparable mean length of utterance levels were compared for verb argument structure. Findings suggest that syntactic difficulties may delay children with DS in overcoming the optional subject phenomena and the lesser number of anomalous…

This study evaluated an Extended Optional Infinitive theory of specific language impairment (SLI) in children, which suggests that SLI children omit finiteness markers longer than do normally developing children. Comparison of 18 SLI 5-year olds with 2 normally developing groups (ages 5 and 3) found that SLI subjects omitted finiteness markers…