Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2011
Children with specific language impairment (SLI) vary widely in their ability to use tense/agreement inflections depending on the type of language being acquired, a fact that current accounts of SLI have tried to explain. Finnish provides an important test case for these accounts because: (1) verbs in the first and second person permit null subjects whereas verbs in the third person do not; and (2) tense and agreement inflections are agglutinating and thus one type of inflection can appear without the other. Probes were used to compare the verb inflection use of Finnish-speaking children with SLI, and both age-matched and younger typically developing children. The children with SLI were less accurate, and the pattern of their errors did not match predictions based on current accounts of SLI. It appears that children with SLI have difficulty learning complex verb inflection paradigms apart from any problem specific to tense and agreement.
The research reported here was supported by research grant R01 DC00458 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health and by the Academy of Finland. We wish to thank the families for participating in the project and Patricia Deevy for her helpful comments on the manuscript.
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