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Children with specific language impairment often show an uneven profile within the area of morphosyntax. For example, in English, the use of tense and agreement morphemes stands out as an area of special weakness. In Swedish, both word order and the use of tense are especially problematic. These weaknesses are resolved only gradually. Thus far, the theoretical frameworks that might account for the findings constitute only partial solutions. Some provide a very insightful description of the difficulty but do not explain the systematic, incremental changes seen over time; others provide a plausible account of the gradual change but lack the precision necessary to explain the differences across languages. An alternative view that incorporates the empirically supported claims of the previous approaches will be offered. The alternative assumes that many of the characteristics of the SLI profile, including crosslinguistic differences in the profile, can be traced to details in the input, and that children’s ability to interpret successively larger grammatical units in input sentences can lead to the gradual, incremental changes seen in the children’s morphosyntactic use. Observations supporting these assumptions will be provided, and their theoretical as well as clinical implications will be discussed. |
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