Purpose: This study tested the feasibility of a method designed to assess children's sensitivity to tense/agreement information in fronted auxiliaries during online comprehension of questions (e.g., "Are the nice little dogs running?"). We expected that a group of children who were proficient in auxiliary use would show this sensitivity,…

Purpose: Composite measures of children's use of tense and agreement morphology differ in their emphasis on accuracy, diversity, or productivity, yet little is known about how these different measures change over time. An understanding of these differences is especially important for the study of children with specific language impairment, given…

The aim of this study was to determine whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) are sensitive to completion cues in their comprehension of tense. In two experiments, children with SLI (ages 4 ; 1 to 6 ; 4) and typically developing (TD) children (ages 3 ; 5 to 6 ; 5) participated in a sentence-to-scene matching task adapted from…

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…

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."…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have well-documented problems in the use of tense-related grammatical morphemes. However, in English, tense often overlaps with aspect and modality. In this study, 15 children with SLI (mean age 5;2) and two groups of 15 typically developing children (mean ages 3;6 and 5;3) were compared in terms of…