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Tense and aspect in sentence interpretation by children with specific language impairment*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

LAURENCE B. LEONARD  and
PATRICIA DEEVY
LAURENCE B. LEONARD*
Affiliation:
Purdue University
PATRICIA DEEVY
Affiliation:
Purdue University
*
Address for correspondence: Laurence B. Leonard, Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, 500 Oval Drive, Heavilon Hall, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. e-mail: xdxl@purdue.edu
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Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) are sensitive to completion cues in their comprehension of tense. In two experiments, children with SLI (ages 4 ; 1 to 6 ; 4) and typically developing (TD) children (ages 3 ; 5 to 6 ; 5) participated in a sentence-to-scene matching task adapted from Wagner (2001). Sentences were in either present or past progressive and used telic predicates. Actions were performed twice in succession; the action was either completed or not completed in the first instance. In both experiments, the children with SLI were less accurate than the TD children, showing more difficulty with past than present progressive, regardless of completion cues. The TD children were less accurate with past than present progressive requests only when the past actions were incomplete. These findings suggest that children with SLI may be relatively insensitive to cues pertaining to event completion in past tense contexts.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , March 2010 , pp. 395 - 418
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported in part by research grant R01 DC00458 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health. The authors thank Jeanette S. Leonard, Hope Gulker, Lisa Weil, Elgustus Polite, Jessie Grskovic, Andrea Miller, Ashley Flad, Megan Garrity, Amanda Niehaus, Heather Redden, Selena Willett, Gernise Dixon and Emily Ernstberger for their assistance in this project.

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