Miller Carol A, Leonard Laurence B, Finneran Denise
Communication Sciences and Disorders, 308 Ford Building, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802-3100, USA.
Int J Lang Commun Disord. 2008 May-Jun;43(3):346-60. doi: 10.1080/13682820701546813.
Existing evidence suggests that young children with specific language impairment have unusual difficulty in detecting omissions of obligatory tense-marking morphemes, but little is known about adolescents' sensitivity to such violations.
The study investigated whether limitations in receptive morphosyntax (as measured by grammaticality judgements) were present at age 16 years, and, if so, whether participants' profiles showed less sensitivity to omissions of tense and agreement morphemes than to (1) inappropriate uses (intrusions) of these same morphemes, and (2) omissions of morphemes that do not encode tense and agreement. The study also compared adolescents with language impairment and non-verbal IQ more than 1 standard deviation (SD) below the mean (nonspecific language impairment) to adolescents with specific language impairment.
METHODS & PROCEDURES: Adolescents with specific language impairment (n = 48), adolescents with non-specific language impairment (n = 25), and adolescents with normal language development (n = 108) performed speeded grammaticality judgements of sentences presented over headphones. Half the sentences were ungrammatical. They included omissions of non-tense morphemes (-ing and possessive -s), omissions of tense morphemes (-ed and third-person singular present -s), and intrusions of the same tense morphemes. The A' statistic was used as the dependent variable for comparisons across groups and item types.
OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Overall, the normal language development group was more sensitive to grammatical violations than the specific language impairment and non-specific language impairment groups, and there was no significant interaction of group and item type. Post-hoc analyses showed that the specific language impairment group was less sensitive to violations than the normal language development group on each item type, and the specific language impairment and non-specific language impairment groups did not differ. Across groups, performance on omission of past tense -ed was lowest, and properties of the items that may have contributed to this difference were explored.
The adolescents with language impairment in this study showed evidence of reduced sensitivity to morphological errors, including both tense-marking and non-tense-marking morphemes, but no evidence of any extraordinary difficulty in detecting the omission of tense-marking morphemes, in contrast to results from other research on younger children with specific language impairment. Participants whose non-verbal IQ score was too low to meet the criteria for specific language impairment performed similarly to their peers with specific language impairment. Grammatical competence is compromised in these adolescents with specific language impairment and non-specific language impairment. Neither researchers nor clinicians can assume that adolescents with language impairment have fully mastered grammatical morphology.
现有证据表明，患有特定语言障碍的幼儿在检测强制性时态标记语素的省略方面存在异常困难，但对于青少年对这类违反语法现象的敏感度却知之甚少。
本研究调查了16岁青少年是否存在接受性形态句法方面的局限性（通过语法判断来衡量），如果存在，参与者对时态和一致性语素省略的敏感度是否低于对（1）这些相同语素的不恰当使用（侵入），以及（2）不编码时态和一致性的语素省略。该研究还将语言障碍且非言语智商低于平均水平1个标准差（SD）的青少年（非特定语言障碍）与患有特定语言障碍的青少年进行了比较。
患有特定语言障碍的青少年（n = 48）、患有非特定语言障碍的青少年（n = 25）和语言发育正常的青少年（n = 108）对通过耳机呈现的句子进行快速语法判断。一半的句子是不符合语法规则的。它们包括非时态语素（-ing和所有格 -s）的省略、时态语素（-ed和第三人称单数现在时 -s）的省略，以及相同时态语素的侵入。A' 统计量用作跨组和项目类型比较的因变量。
总体而言，语言发育正常组比特定语言障碍组和非特定语言障碍组对语法违规更敏感，且组和项目类型之间没有显著的交互作用。事后分析表明，特定语言障碍组在每种项目类型上对违规的敏感度都低于语言发育正常组，且特定语言障碍组和非特定语言障碍组没有差异。在所有组中，过去时态 -ed省略的表现最差，并对可能导致这种差异的项目属性进行了探讨。
本研究中患有语言障碍的青少年表现出对形态错误敏感度降低的证据，包括时态标记和非时态标记语素，但与其他针对患有特定语言障碍的幼儿的研究结果不同，没有证据表明在检测时态标记语素的省略方面存在任何特别困难。非言语智商得分过低而不符合特定语言障碍标准的参与者，其表现与患有特定语言障碍的同龄人相似。这些患有特定语言障碍和非特定语言障碍的青少年的语法能力受到损害。研究人员和临床医生都不能假定患有语言障碍的青少年已经完全掌握了语法形态。
