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Surface Forms and Grammatical Functions

2003; American Speech–Language–Hearing Association; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1044/1092-4388(2003/004)

1558-9102

Laurence B. Leonard, Patricia Deevy, Carol Miller, Leila Rauf, Monique Charest, Robert M. Kurtz,

Child and Animal Learning Development

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) use past tense - ed in fewer obligatory contexts than younger normally developing children matched for mean length of utterance (MLU). In this study, the use of passive participle - ed (e.g., kissed in The frog got kissed by the kitty ) as well as past tense - ed was examined in children with SLI, normally developing children matched for age (ND-A), and normally developing children matched for MLU (ND-MLU). The children with SLI used both past tense - ed and passive participle - ed in fewer obligatory contexts than both the ND-A and the ND-MLU children. Only the children with SLI had greater difficulty with past tense - ed than with passive participle - ed . The pattern of findings indicates that the surface properties of - ed cannot adequately account for the past tense - ed difficulty shown by the children with SLI. However, the fact that the children with SLI were less consistent than the ND-MLU children in using passive participle - ed suggests that either the surface properties of - ed are responsible for a portion of the difficulty or these children have a separate, non-tenserelated deficit in the area of verb morphology.