Normal language development and language impairment: Syntax and beyond

Abstract

The characterization of the linguistic behaviour of a particular group of severely language-impaired school-aged children is addressed here, in terms both of categories derived from normal development, and of features identified as typical of the language-impaired data.The normal data base consists of child-adult conversations involving British children at three, five and seven years of age. The language-impaired corpus is composed of similar conversations (organized according to the same protocols as those with normals) with seven- to nine-year-old children with specific language disorders, attending residential schools or language units.In the absence of structural categories which distinguish the linguistic behaviour of the language-impaired children, the analysis focuses on a functional category, specifically adverbials, and on certain types of non-occurrence of grammatical elements, specifically clause subject, verb phrase auxiliary and noun phrase determiner. The functional analysis finds both quantitative and qualitative differences in the use of temporal expressions between the two groups. The non-occurrence patterns are described in detail for a smaller subset of the normal and language-impaired children, and some possible sources for these patterns are discussed.

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