Toward tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English-speaking children
Toward tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English-speaking children
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DOI：
10.1044/jshr.3906.1239
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发表时间：
1996-12-01
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Wexler, K
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Rice, ML;Wexler, K
一个关键的临床问题是识别临床标记物，一种可以被证明是具有特定语言障碍(SLI)儿童特征的语言形式或原则。在这篇文章中，我们评估了一组标记时态的语素作为候选的临床标记。在英语中，这包括-S第三人称单数，-ed常规过去时，be，和do。根据莱斯、韦克斯勒和克里夫(1995)的扩展可选不定式解释(EOI)，这组语素很可能在SLI儿童的语法中以低于年轻对照组明显的可选性的速度出现。三组学龄前儿童参加了实验：37名SLI儿童和两个对照组，一组为40名MLU等值儿童，另一组为45名同龄儿童。三种证据支持这样的结论：一组标记时态的语素可以被认为是临床标记：(A)SLI组目标语素相对于两个控制组的目标语素的准确率较低；(B)由时态的语言功能定义的语素集的影响，但不是与时态无关的语素；以及(C)相对于同龄人，时态标记语素的双峰分布，其中典型的儿童基本上处于成人语法水平，而SLI组儿童的表现水平较低(即非成人期)。临床症状明显表现为体表形态的遗漏。主谓一致的错误和句法错误很少，这表明，正如所预测的那样，处于EOI阶段的儿童很可能同时选择性地标记时态，他们对成人语法中的限定和一致的语法性质非常了解。这一发现从SLI儿童语法局限性的不同解释和对临床鉴定的启示方面进行了讨论。
A critical clinical issue is the identification of a clinical marker, a linguistic form or principle that can be shown to be characteristic of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). In this paper we evaluate, as candidate clinical markers, a set of morphemes that mark Tense. In English, this includes -s third person singular, -ed regular past, BE, and DO. According to the Extended Optional Infinitive Account (EOI) of Rice, Wexler, and Cleave (1995), this set of morphemes is likely to appear optionally in the grammars of children with SLI at a rate lower than the optionality evident in younger controls. Three groups of preschool children participated: 37 children with SLI, and two control groups, one of 40 MLU-equivalent children and another of 45 age-equivalent children. Three kinds of evidence support the conclusion that a set of morphemes that marks Tense can be considered a clinical marker: (a) low levels of accuracy for the target morphemes for the SLI group relative to either of the two control groups; (b) affectedness for the set of morphemes defined by the linguistic function of Tense, but not for morphemes unrelated to Tense; and (c) a bimodal distribution for Tense-marking morphemes relative to age peers, in which the typical children are at essentially adult levels of the grammar, whereas children in the SLI group were at low (i.e., non-adultlike) levels of performance. The clinical symptoms are evident in omissions of surface forms. Errors of subject-verb agreement and syntactic misuses are rare, showing that, as predicted, children in an EOI stage who are likely to mark Tense optionally at the same time know a great deal about the grammatical properties of finiteness and agreement in the adult grammar. The findings are discussed in terms of alternative accounts of the grammatical limitations of children with SLI and implications for clinical identification.