Yarbay Duman Tuba, Topbaş Seyhun
Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Center, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Speech and Language Therapy, Istanbul Medipol University, Istanbul, Turkey.
Int J Lang Commun Disord. 2016 Nov;51(6):732-744. doi: 10.1111/1460-6984.12244. Epub 2016 Apr 13.
Impairments in tense morphology are characteristic of English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). Recent studies have investigated the role that aspect plays in the difficulties found in tense morphology. It has been suggested that children with SLI are less sensitive to aspect and its interaction with tense than typically developing (TD) children. Profound impairment in past tense morphology compared with the present in this population was explained by a breakdown in the association between event completion information and past tense. To date, research on tense morphology in this population has not examined all three tense conditions in a single study.
To examine whether monolingual Turkish-speaking children with SLI exhibit deficits in comprehending tense and aspect morphology, and, if so, whether these deficits are restricted to completed events (past tense) or also occur for incomplete non-past events (future and present tense).
METHODS & PROCEDURES: A sentence-picture matching task was administered to 36 monolingual Turkish-speaking children: 13 with SLI (mean age = 6;9 years) and 23 age-matched TD children (mean age = 6;5 years). Upon hearing a sentence, each child had to select between a target (past, present or future) and a distracter picture. Tense and aspect information could only be established from verb morphology.
OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The SLI group had lower accuracy than the TD group on all test conditions. For both groups, present tense had the highest accuracy scores. Performance scores within the SLI group showed the following hierarchy from easy to difficult: present > future > past.
CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Turkish children with SLI have deficits in comprehending tense and aspect morphology. Although comprehending past was more difficult than non-past (present and future), future was more difficult to comprehend than the present. This disassociation between two non-past incomplete events indicates that the underlying difficulties comprehending (past) tense-aspect is not restricted to event completion in past tense contexts. This finding raises the possibility that in children with SLI, non-temporal epistemic functions of verb morphology (i.e., certainty, probability or possibility of an event occurring) might play a role in efficient understanding of tense and aspect morphology. If so, children with SLI may benefit from language therapy focused on the epistemic functions of verb morphology to improve comprehension of tense and aspect.
时态形态受损是患有特定语言障碍（SLI）的英语儿童的特征。最近的研究调查了体在时态形态困难中所起的作用。有人提出，与典型发育（TD）儿童相比，患有SLI的儿童对体及其与时态的相互作用不太敏感。该人群中过去时态形态与现在时态相比存在严重受损，这是由事件完成信息与过去时态之间的关联中断所解释的。迄今为止，关于该人群时态形态的研究尚未在一项研究中考察所有三种时态条件。
研究单语土耳其语SLI儿童在理解时态和体形态方面是否存在缺陷，如果存在，这些缺陷是否仅限于完成事件（过去时态），还是也出现在未完成的非过去事件（将来时态和现在时态）中。
对36名单语土耳其语儿童进行了句子-图片匹配任务：13名患有SLI（平均年龄 = 6岁9个月），23名年龄匹配的TD儿童（平均年龄 = 6岁5个月）。听到句子后，每个孩子必须在目标（过去、现在或将来）图片和干扰图片之间进行选择。时态和体信息只能从动词形态中确定。
在所有测试条件下，SLI组的准确率均低于TD组。对于两组来说，现在时态的准确率得分最高。SLI组内的表现得分从易到难呈现以下顺序：现在 > 将来 > 过去。
患有SLI的土耳其儿童在理解时态和体形态方面存在缺陷。虽然理解过去时态比非过去时态（现在和将来）更困难，但理解将来时态比现在时态更困难。这两个非过去未完成事件之间的这种分离表明，理解（过去）时态-体的潜在困难并不局限于过去时态语境中的事件完成情况。这一发现增加了一种可能性，即在患有SLI的儿童中，动词形态的非时间认知功能（即事件发生的确定性、可能性或概率）可能在有效理解时态和体形态中发挥作用。如果是这样，患有SLI的儿童可能会从专注于动词形态认知功能的语言治疗中受益，以提高对时态和体的理解。
