TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ott, Susan
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Verb inflection in German-learning children with typical and atypical language acquisition
BT  - the impact of subsyllabic frequencies
JF  - Journal of child language
N2  - Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional verb paradigm than English. Using an elicitation task, the production of inflected nonce verb forms (3rd person singular with - t suffix) with either high-or low-frequency subsyllables was tested in sixteen German-learning children with SLI (ages 4;1-5;1), sixteen TD-children matched for chronological age (CA) and fourteen TD-children matched for verbal age (VA) (ages 3;0-3;11). The findings revealed that children with SLI, but not CA-or VA-children, showed differential performance between the two types of verbs, producing more inflectional errors when the verb forms resulted in low-frequency subsyllables than when they resulted in high-frequency subsyllables, replicating the results from English-learning children.
KW  - english past tense
KW  - sentence repetition
KW  - nonword repetition
KW  - speaking children
KW  - impairment
KW  - morphology
KW  - infants
KW  - speech
KW  - words
Y1  - 2012
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S030500091200027X
SN  - 0305-0009
VL  - 40
IS  - 1
SP  - 169
EP  - 192
PB  - Cambridge University Press
CY  - New York
ER  -