There is growing evidence that the grammatical errors reflected in the speech of young children are often related to the nature of the input in the ambient language. Although theoretical frameworks differ in the degree to which input plays a role, there is acknowledgment that children require more input than previously assumed to resolve apparent…

Purpose: This study tested children's sensitivity to tense/agreement information in fronted auxiliaries during online comprehension of questions (e.g., "Are the nice little dogs running?"). Data from children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were compared to previously published data from typically developing (TD) children…

Purpose: This study was specifically designed to examine how verb variability and verb overlap in a morphosyntactic priming task affect typically developing children's use and generalization of auxiliary IS. Method: Forty typically developing 2- to 3-year-old native English-speaking children with inconsistent auxiliary IS production were primed…

Noun-related morphosyntax has not been emphasized in the literature on children with specific language impairment (SLI), yet, across languages, problems in this area are quite apparent. This review is designed to highlight noun-related difficulties that seem to be especially troublesome for these children. A review of the research literature on…

Purpose: This study examined sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI) in a manner designed to separate the contribution of cognitive capacity from the effects of syntactic structure. Method: Nineteen children with SLI, 19 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A), and 19 younger typically developing…

Purpose: P. A. Hadley and H. Short (2005) developed a set of measures designed to assess the emerging diversity and productivity of tense and agreement (T/A) morpheme use by 2-year-olds. The authors extended 2 of these measures to the preschool years to evaluate their utility in distinguishing children with specific language impairment (SLI) from…

Brief tonal stimuli and spoken sentences were utilized to examine whether adolescents (aged 14;3-18;1) with specific language impairments (SLI) exhibit atypical neural activity for rapid auditory processing of non-linguistic stimuli and linguistic processing of verb-agreement and semantic constraints. Further, we examined whether the behavioral…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their normally developing (ND) peers imitated proper nouns, the pronouns "he" and "you," and the article "the" in subject phrases. Both groups showed significantly more omissions of the function words than the proper nouns. A phonological explanation of subject article and pronoun omission is…

Focus is one factor that may account for children's use of single-word utterances after they have acquired the use of multi-word utterances. The possible role that focus may play in children's use of single-word utterances in naturalistic settings, after the acquisition of syntax, was investigated. (SW)

A study examined the processing of low-phonetic-substance inflections versus a higher-phonetic-substance inflection by 21 children (age 8) with specific language impairments (SLI), 21 chronological age matched, and 21 receptive syntax matched children in a word-recognition reaction time (RT) task and an off-line task requiring judgments about…

Fourteen preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) and 12 younger controls were more likely to produce auxiliary "is" to describe target pictures when the preceding sentence contained auxiliary "are" than when it contained past tense. Use of "is" was least likely when the preceding sentence was nonfinite. (Contains references.) (CR)

Various commentaries are included in response to an article on filler syllables and their status in emerging grammar. (Author/VWL)

Deals with an examination of available evidence concerning the speech of language impaired children, and an inspection of the evidence regarding other, nonlinguistic behaviors of these children that require related abilities in mental representation. (Author/MP)

Analysis of the spontaneous speech of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced Italian subjects' tendency to use articles. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the language groups. (Author/CB)

Examination of a two-year-old's early determiner-noun combinations suggested that early article use can be distributed across a variety of nouns, and that such usage does not seem appropriately characterized as a pattern of limited semantic scope. (CB)