Tense over time: the longitudinal course of tense acquisition in children with specific language impairment.

Tense marking in English is relatively late appearing and is especially late for children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Little is known about the full course of acquisition for this set of morphemes. Because tense marking is a fundamental property of clause construction, it is central to current theories of morphosyntax and language acquisition. A longitudinal study is reported that encompasses the years of 2;6-8;9 years for typically developing children (N = 43) and 4;6-8;8 years for children with SLI (N = 21). The findings show that a diverse set of morphemes share the property of tense marking; that this set is not mastered until age 4 years in typically developing children and after 7 years for children with SLI; that acquisition shows linear and nonlinear components for both groups, in a typical S-shaped curve; and that nonsyntactic measures are not predictors of growth (including nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary size, and mother's education), whereas initial MLU does predict rate of acquisition. The findings are consistent with a model of Optional Infinitives (OI) for typically developing children (cf. Wexler, 1994, 1996) and Extended Optional Infinitives (EOI) for children with SLI. This model hypothesizes incomplete specification of features of tense that are represented in the grammar.

[1]  A. Bryk,et al.  Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender. , 1991 .

[2]  Laurence B. Leonard,et al.  Children with Specific Language Impairment , 1997 .

[3]  M. Nippold,et al.  Children With Slow Expressive Language DevelopmentWhat Is the Forecast for School Achievement , 1996 .

[4]  N. Astone,et al.  Some Practical Guidelines for Measuring Youth's Race/Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Status , 1994 .

[5]  Gordon Wells,et al.  Language Development in the Pre-School Years , 1985 .

[6]  Harald Clahsen,et al.  Functional Categories in Early Child German , 1993 .

[7]  D. Thal,et al.  Language and gesture in late talkers: a 1-year follow-up. , 1991, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[8]  H. V. D. Lely,et al.  A Grammatical Specific Language Impairment in Children: An Autosomal Dominant Inheritance? , 1996, Brain and Language.

[9]  D. Poeppel,et al.  The full competence hypothesis of clause structure in early German , 1993 .

[10]  P. Menyuk,et al.  Variability in children's use of grammatical morphemes , 1992, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[11]  M L Rice,et al.  Morphological deficits of children with SLI: evaluation of number marking and agreement. , 1993, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[12]  M L Rice,et al.  Plural acquisition in children with specific language impairment. , 1993, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[13]  Carlo Cecchetto,et al.  Introduction to Government and Binding Theory , 1996 .

[14]  R. Langacker Foundations of cognitive grammar , 1983 .

[15]  J. Elman,et al.  Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development , 1996 .

[16]  Jürgen Weissenborn,et al.  Routes to Verb Placement in Early German and French: The Independence of Finiteness and Agreement , 1992 .

[17]  J. Tomblin,et al.  Prevalence of specific language impairment in kindergarten children. , 1997, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[18]  Kenneth Wexler,et al.  The development of inflection in a biologically based theory of language acquisition. , 1996 .

[19]  D. Loeb,et al.  Subject case marking and verb morphology in normally developing and specifically language-impaired children. , 1991, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[20]  M L Rice,et al.  Specific language impairment as a period of extended optional infinitive. , 1995, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[21]  M. Rice In Search of a Grammatical Marker of Language Impairment in Children , 1998 .

[22]  Kenneth Wexler,et al.  Subject Case in Children With SLI and Unaffected Controls: Evidence for the Agr/Tns Omission Model , 1998 .

[23]  P. A. Villiers,et al.  A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech , 1973, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[24]  Jacob Cohen Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , 1969, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[25]  Viviane Déprez,et al.  Negation and functional projections in early grammar , 1993 .

[26]  K. Wexler,et al.  Innateness and maturation in linguistic development. , 1990, Developmental psychobiology.

[27]  A. E. Pierce,et al.  Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory: A Comparative Analysis of French and English Child Grammars , 1992 .

[28]  Harald Clahsen,et al.  Child Language and Developmental Dysphasia: Linguistic studies of the acquisition of German , 1991 .

[29]  Hannelore Grimm,et al.  An Extended Optional Infinitive Stage in German-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment , 1997 .

[30]  Irving Lorge,et al.  Columbia mental maturity scale , 1954 .

[31]  M L Rice,et al.  An examination of the morpheme BE in children with specific language impairment: the role of contractibility and grammatical form class. , 1997, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[32]  E. Bates,et al.  Language and gesture in late talkers. , 1988, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[33]  K. Wexler,et al.  Toward tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English-speaking children. , 1996, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[34]  Rebecca J. Panagos Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children , 1998 .

[35]  K. Nelson Strategies for first language teaching. , 1989 .

[36]  R. Paul Clinical Implications of the Natural History of Slow Expressive Language Development , 1996 .

[37]  E. Bates,et al.  Continuity in lexical and morphological development: a test of the critical mass hypothesis , 1994, Journal of Child Language.

[38]  D. Sherman,et al.  Review of Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation. , 1970 .

[39]  M. Baltin,et al.  The Mental representation of grammatical relations , 1985 .

[40]  R. Brown,et al.  A First Language , 1973 .

[41]  Hagit Borer,et al.  The Maturation of Syntax , 1987 .

[42]  P. A. Yantis Early Correlates of Speech, Language and Hearing, , 1980 .

[43]  Harald Clahsen,et al.  Dissociations in SLI children's inflectional systems: A study of participle inflection and subject-verb-agreement , 1993 .