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Proficiency with tense and aspect concordance: children with SLI and their typically developing peers*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2010

AMANDA J. OWEN
AMANDA J. OWEN*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, Communication Sciences & Disorders; Member, DeLTA Center
*
Address for correspondence: Amanda J. Owen, 121 A SHC, Dept of Speech Pathology, 400 Hawkins Dr., University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242. tel: 319-335-6951; e-mail: amanda-owen@uiowa.edu
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Abstract

Children with SLI have difficulty with tense and agreement morphology. This study examined the proficiency of these children and their typically developing peers with the coordination of tense and aspect markers in two-clause sentences. Scenarios designed to elicit past tense were presented to five- to eight-year-old children with SLI (n=14) and their normally developing age- and MLU-matched peers (n=24) to examine the omission of tense markers in complex sentences (Owen, 2010). Responses with overt tense/aspect morphology in both clauses were recoded for how similar the use of tense and aspect was across the two clauses. Tense and aspect concordance was high across both sentence types, but aspect-only mismatches were more common than tense mismatches. The three groups of children did not differ from each other on any comparisons. Coordination of temporal information in sentences with more than one time marker does not appear to be especially difficult for these children.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , June 2011 , pp. 675 - 699
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by an internal research grant from the University of Iowa. I would like to thank the children and families who participated in this project and acknowledge the support of Augustana College (Allison Haskill) and the Scottish Rite Program (Elizabeth Merrifield) for assistance with subject recruitment. Stacy Meyers and Marie Christiansen assisted with stimuli development for the elicitation task. The following people assisted with data collection and analysis: Amanda Murphy, Li Sheng, Vicki Samelson, Rebecca Eness, Kenneth Marciniak, Rachel Wakefield, Lyndi Hill, Laura Romey, Katie Errek and Talia Hindin. This article benefited from careful reading by Jean K. Gordon and Melissa Duff and discussion within the Language Discussion Group at the University of Iowa. Portions of the article were presented at the Society for Research in Child Language Disorders held in Madison, WI in 2009.

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