Morphological Deficits in Specific Language Impairment

描述(申请人提供)：有特殊语言障碍(SLI)的儿童在语法能力上往往表现出严重的局限性。更清楚地了解这些局限性的原因可能会导致对这些儿童更准确的诊断方法和更有效的治疗方法。拟议项目的目的是探索SLI儿童表现出严重语法限制的可能基础。为了实现这一总体目标，将对SLI儿童的语法理解和语言表达能力进行四种语言的测试，英语、意大利语、芬兰语和匈牙利语。来自这些不同语言的数据将被用来评估最近关于说英语的SLI儿童语法缺陷的三种说法的相对充分性。由于意大利语、芬兰语和匈牙利语的语法特征在关键方面与英语不同，它们更清楚地说明了英语中混淆因素的作用，从而有助于解释从说英语的SLI儿童那里获得的数据。将这些其他语言包括在内，还可以确定归因于时态和一致的语法细节的问题是否因语法方面的问题而变得复杂。实验程序还被设计用来确定句子表达中的问题，这些问题可能会加剧可归因于有限语法知识的任何困难。最后，通过仔细选择要研究的语法细节，将有可能确定说非裔美国英语的SLI儿童在相同的语法领域是否存在严重困难，而这些领域在讲SLI的主流美国英语儿童中被发现最脆弱。这一发现可能会导致一种统一的理论，即语言障碍是如何在学习英语的儿童中发展和持续的。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often show serious limitations in grammatical ability. A clearer understanding of the reasons for these limitations could lead to more accurate methods of diagnosis and more effective methods of treatment for these children. The purpose of the proposed project is to explore the possible bases of the serious grammatical limitations exhibited by children with SLI. To accomplish this general goal, the grammatical comprehension and production abilities of children with SLI will be examined across four languages, English, Italian, Finnish, and Hungarian. Data from these different languages will be used to assess the relative adequacy of three recent accounts of grammatical deficits in English-speaking children with SLI. Because the grammatical properties of Italian, Finnish, and Hungarian differ from those of English in critical ways, they offer a clearer view of the contribution of factors that are confounded in English, thereby facilitating interpretation of the data obtained from the English-speaking children with SLI. Inclusion of these other languages will also permit a determination of whether problems attributed to the grammatical details of tense and agreement are being compounded by problems with grammatical aspect. The experimental procedures are also designed to identify problems in sentence formulation that may exacerbate any difficulty attributable to limited grammatical knowledge. Finally, through careful selection of the grammatical details to be studied, it will be possible to determine whether children with SLI who speak African American English have serious difficulties in the same areas of grammar that have been found most fragile in mainstream American Englishspeaking children with SLI. Such a finding could lead to a uniform theory of how language impairment might develop and persist among children acquiring English.