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Two compound-word tasks were used to evaluate the hypothesis that children with SLI have grammatical deficits in excess of lexical deficits. Sixteen 5-8 year-old children with SLI, 16 vocabulary-matches, and 16 age-mates participated. In the first task, children named novel compound words in four priming conditions, with the number of modeled constituents and the order of those models manipulated. In the second task, based on Krott & Nicoladis (2005), children described the meanings of known compounds. While complete and ordered models provided better responses than partial and/or misordered models, lexical manipulations did not distinguish children with SLI, though grammatical manipulations did. Children with SLI performed no differently from their age-mates on the lexical measures of the first task, and from vocabulary-mates on the second task, but performed poorly in comparison to both comparison groups on formation of compounds and poorly in comparison to vocabulary-mates in articulating that relationship. We conclude that children with SLI have extraordinary deficits in grammar in comparison to the lexicon.
The authors wish to acknowledge NIH-NIDCD 2 R01 DC003698-06. |
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