Journal article

Publication year: 1997

Pages: 151-171

Journal: Journal of Neurolinguistics

Volume number: 10

Issue number: 2-3

DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0911-6044(97)00006-7

Publisher: Elsevier

Abstract: 

One important problem in the recent theoretical debate on Specific
Language Impairment (SLI) is that most of the SLI accounts have not yet
been tested crosslinguistically. As a step towards a crosslinguistic
characterization of SLI, we directly compare data from nine English and
six German SLI subjects in this paper. We found that subject-verb
agreement is more impaired than tense marking, and that all SLI subjects
achieve low scores for subject-verb agreement. Moreover, we found that
SLI children produce structures which have been reported to be absent
from the speech of unimpaired children, e.g. root infinitives with fully
specified subjects and verb-second patterns with non-finite verbs. The
results will be explained in terms of the agreement-deficit hypothesis:
formal features which do not have a semantic interpretation,
specifically ϑ-features of verbs, cause acquisition problems for SLI
children.

Harvard Citation style: Clahsen, H., Bartke, S. and Göllner, S. (1997) Formal features in impaired grammars : a comparison of English and German SLI children, Journal of Neurolinguistics, 10(2-3), pp. 151-171. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0911-6044(97)00006-7

APA Citation style: Clahsen, H., Bartke, S., & Göllner, S. (1997). Formal features in impaired grammars : a comparison of English and German SLI children. Journal of Neurolinguistics. 10(2-3), 151-171. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0911-6044(97)00006-7