Noun-related morphosyntactic difficulties in specific language impairment across languages

Abstract

Noun-related morphosyntax has not been emphasized in the literature on children with specific language impairment (SLI), yet, across languages, problems in this area are quite apparent. This review is designed to highlight noun-related difficulties that seem to be especially troublesome for these children. A review of the research literature on children with SLI was conducted, including work on a wide range of languages. Children with SLI were found to have weaknesses greater than those of younger typically developing compatriots in such noun-related areas as articles, possessive inflections, full subject pronouns, agglutinating noun suffixes, and pronominal clitics. Factors seemingly responsible for these difficulties include prosody, case assignment, agreement, and both grammatical and phonological opacity. Each language reviewed provides evidence of serious problems with select noun-related morphemes in the speech of children with SLI. The emphasis in language assessment will necessarily have to vary across languages, not because children vary in their ability to overcome the obstacles that these factors present, but rather because the typology of a language will dictate the extent to which these factors are operative in the language.