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…

This study examined difficulties in the use of -ed as passive participle or as past tense in 12 young children with specific language impairment. Results suggest that either the surface properties of -ed are related to the difficulty or these children have a separate, non-tense- related deficit in the area of verb morphology. (Contains…

This study examined the influence of argument-MA-structure complexity on the omission of auxiliary "be" verbs in 30 children with specific language impairment (SLI). Results indicated that the children with SLI and controls matched for mean length of utterance were more likely to omit the auxiliary forms when attempting sentences with greater…

Evaluation of the grammatical morphology used by 50 preschool children with specific language impairment as a function of their lexical diversity found their use of finite-verb morphology (based on number of different verbs used) and noun-related morphology lagged behind expectations in comparison to a group of normally developing preschoolers.…

The study found that eight specifically language-impaired children (ages four and five) were more limited than eight normally developing children (ages two and three, matched for mean utterance length) in the use of both subject case marking and verb morphology. A relationship between the two types of usage was found in both groups of children.…