This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific…

The study group consisted of 30 children with cochlear implants (CI) and 30 children with normal hearing (NH), whose ages were 4 years and 7 years 11 months. Turkish Test of Early Language Development (TEDIL) was used to assess the language skills of the children. Language samples were gathered by using Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI).…

Structured input from both teachers and peers maximizes the opportunities for preschoolers to learn grammatical forms. The purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate the effectiveness of using a teacher and a peer with typical hearing and language skills to model grammatically correct verbal responses to action "wh-" questions…

Background: Personal narratives are descriptions of past events experienced by the speaker and are one of the most commonly found forms of narration in children. The ability to tell personal narratives is considered critical for socio-emotional wellbeing and academic performance. Aims: This study investigated the personal narrative skills of 25…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to test Bedore and Leonard's (1998) proposal that a verb morpheme composite may hold promise as a clinical marker for specific language impairment (SLI) in English speakers and serve as an accurate basis for the classification of children with and without SLI beyond the preschool level. Method: The language…

Morphosyntactic skills in spontaneous and elicited production of a 7-year-old boy with specific language impairment (SLI) were examined and compared to those of younger, mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched, typically-developing children. This study focused on inflectional phrase structures as well as complex constructions in order to…

Purpose: Many typically developing children first use inflections such as "-ed" with verb predicates whose meanings are compatible with the functions of the inflection (e.g., using "-ed" when describing events of brief duration with clear end points, such as "dropped"). This tendency is assumed to be beneficial for…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often have extraordinary difficulty in the use of tense and agreement morphemes. Because spontaneous speech samples may not provide a sufficient number of obligatory contexts for these morphemes, structured probe items are often employed. However, these usually emphasize actions that can be readily…

A group of preschool-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI), a group of typically developing children matched for age (TD-A), and a group of younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU) were presented with novel verbs in contexts that required them to inflect with past tense "-ed."…

Language sample analysis measures have long been promoted as exhibiting greater ecological validity than formal testing in the assessment of language disorder in children. In practice, their use is often restricted to preschool children, owing to lack of normative information, as well as criticisms of the validity of commonly used measures for the…

This paper reports on two studies of finite verb use to determine whether children with specific language impairments, who use grammatical morphemes less than typical children matched for mean length of utterance (MLU), produce other language details more frequently. The paper concluded that offsetting effects are not necessary in principle, given…

Mean length of utterance (MLU) of 15 Down's Syndrome children, aged 2-12, was examined and found to correlate highly with chronological age despite the children's language delays, at least up to MLU 3.00. MLU also predicted complexity and diversity of bound morphemes and major syntactic structures from MLU 1.00-3.50. (Author/JDD)

Despite the common use of mean length of utterance (MLU) as a diagnostic measure, what it actually reflects in terms of linguistic knowledge is relatively unclear. This study explored the extent to which variance in MLU could be accounted for by a measure of expressive vocabulary and a measure of morphosyntax in a group of 44 typically-developing…

The proposed framework assumes six developmental stages according to mean length of utterance in morphemes. Within each stage, syntactic forms and semantic relations interact. In assessment, each utterance is analyzed for features which describe current language abilities. Language goals are developed based on existing and expected features.…

Background: Although a number of studies have been conducted on normal acquisition in French, systematic methods for analysis of French and normative group data have been lacking. Aims: To develop a systematic method for the analysis of language samples in Quebec French, and to provide preliminary normative data on early lexical and syntactic…