Verb inflection in German-learning children with typical and atypical language acquisition
- 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-learningPrevious 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.…
Author details: | Susan OttGND, Barbara HöhleORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1017/S030500091200027X |
ISSN: | 0305-0009 |
Title of parent work (English): | Journal of child language |
Subtitle (English): | the impact of subsyllabic frequencies |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Place of publishing: | New York |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2012/12/05 |
Publication year: | 2011 |
Release date: | 2017/03/26 |
Tag: | english past tense; impairment; infants; morphology; nonword repetition; sentence repetition; speaking children; speech; words |
Volume: | 40 |
Issue: | 1 |
Number of pages: | 24 |
First page: | 169 |
Last Page: | 192 |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 40 Sprache |
Peer review: | Referiert |
License (German): | Keine öffentliche Lizenz: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz |
External remark: | Zweitveröffentlichung in der Schriftenreihe Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe ; 530 |