Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology, Budapest, Hungary.
Int J Lang Commun Disord. 2010 Mar-Apr;45(2):145-61. doi: 10.3109/13682820902781060.
Children with language impairment often exhibit significant difficulty in the use of grammatical morphology. Although English-speaking children with language impairment have special difficulties with verb morphology, noun morphology can also be problematic in languages of a different typology.
Hungarian is an agglutinating language with multiple suffixation, in which both regular-class and irregular-class nouns contain the same recognizable grammatical markers, but the two classes differ in their morphophonology and productivity. Such typological characteristics provide a good basis for evaluating processing accounts of language impairment such as the morphological richness account.
METHODS & PROCEDURES: We examined the production of Hungarian irregular and regular noun morphology through elicited production of nouns with plural, accusative case and plural plus accusative case suffixes in an older (8-10 years) and a younger (4-7 years) group of children with language impairment and two verbal control groups matched on vocabulary size. The children's accuracy was scored both in terms of grammatical function (whether plural and/or accusative case was appropriately marked) and morphophonology (whether the production reflected the phonotactic form required for the stem plus suffix).
OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The younger children with language impairment were less accurate than the younger verbal control children when two suffixes (marking plural and accusative case) were required, at least when noun stem classes were regular. All groups showed significant overgeneralization of stem forms with correct selection of suffixes. However, there were strong word frequency effects in the language impairment, but not in the verbal control groups.
CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Much of the data were consistent with predictions of the morphological richness account. However, there was also evidence suggestive of differences between the language impairment and verbal control groups in their representations. In particular, the children with language impairment seemed to rely more (though not exclusively) on memorized items in the lexicon.
语言障碍儿童在语法形态的使用上通常存在显著困难。尽管英语语言障碍儿童在动词形态方面存在特殊困难，但在不同类型语言中，名词形态也可能存在问题。
匈牙利语是一种具有多重词缀的黏着语，其中规则类和不规则类名词都包含相同的可识别语法标记，但这两个类别在形态音位学和产性方面存在差异。这种类型学特征为评估语言障碍的处理理论提供了很好的基础，如形态丰富度理论。
我们通过引出名词复数、宾格和复数加宾格后缀的产生，考察了大龄（8-10 岁）和小龄（4-7 岁）语言障碍儿童以及两个词汇量匹配的动词控制组在匈牙利不规则和规则名词形态产生方面的情况。我们根据语法功能（是否正确标记了复数和/或宾格）和形态音位学（是否反映了词干加后缀所需的语音形式）对儿童的准确性进行评分。
需要使用两个后缀（标记复数和宾格）时，小龄语言障碍儿童的准确性低于小龄动词控制儿童，至少在名词词干类别为规则时是如此。所有组在正确选择后缀时都表现出对词干形式的过度泛化。然而，在语言障碍组中存在强烈的词频效应，但在动词控制组中则没有。
大部分数据与形态丰富度理论的预测一致。然而，语言障碍组和动词控制组之间的表现也存在差异的证据。特别是，语言障碍儿童似乎更依赖于词汇中的记忆项目（尽管不是唯一依赖）。
