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…

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…

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…

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…