Marchman V A, Wulfeck B, Ellis Weismer S
University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson 75083-0688, USA.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 1999 Feb;42(1):206-19. doi: 10.1044/jslhr.4201.206.
Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are known to display persistent difficulties with inflectional morphology--in particular, the overuse of unmarked grammatical forms (i.e., zero-marking). Yet, several recent studies have shown that English-speaking children with SLI, like their normal language peers (NL), demonstrate a considerable degree of productive language abilities (e.g., Bishop, 1994; Loeb & Leonard, 1991; Oetting & Horohov, 1997). In this study, we explore productivity in the English past tense in school-age children with SLI (N= 31) and NL (N = 31) who were equivalent as a group in chronological and mental age. Although children in both groups produced a range of error types, the children with SLI produced significantly more errors, with a greater proportion resulting from zero-marking (e.g., go) than suffixation (e.g., goed). Item analyses indicated that suffixations and zero-markings were predicted by item frequency, phonological features of stems, and similarity relationships across items (i.e., neighborhood structure) in both groups, yet children with SLI were more sensitive to item phonology than their NL peers. Results are interpreted in light of the predictions of dual- versus single-mechanism models of morphological productivity. Implications for accounts of SLI are discussed.
患有特定语言障碍（SLI）的儿童在屈折形态方面存在持续困难，尤其是过度使用无标记语法形式（即零标记）。然而，最近的几项研究表明，患有SLI的英语儿童与正常语言的同龄人（NL）一样，表现出相当程度的语言生成能力（例如，Bishop，1994；Loeb & Leonard，1991；Oetting & Horohov，1997）。在本研究中，我们探讨了年龄和心理年龄相当的学龄期患有SLI的儿童（N = 31）和NL儿童（N = 31）在英语过去时态中的语言生成能力。尽管两组儿童都产生了一系列错误类型，但患有SLI的儿童产生的错误明显更多，其中零标记（例如go）导致的错误比例高于后缀标记（例如goed）。项目分析表明，两组中后缀标记和零标记都由项目频率、词干的语音特征以及项目之间的相似关系（即邻域结构）预测，但患有SLI的儿童比他们的NL同龄人对项目语音更敏感。根据形态生成能力的双机制模型与单机制模型的预测对结果进行了解释。讨论了对SLI解释的意义。
