Children with SLI have difficulties with grammatical morphology that are
well documented (see Bishop, ; Leonard, for recent reviews).
Among the most problematic morphemes for these children are function
words and inflections pertaining to tense and agreement. Rice, Wexler, and
their colleagues (Rice, Wexler & Cleave, ; Rice & Wexler, ; Rice,
Wexler & Hershberger, ) have proposed that these children languish in
the optional tense and agreement stage for a protracted period. For example,
even when these children reach a level of mean utterance length at which
normally developing children no longer treat tense and agreement forms as
optional, children with SLI will continue to show optionality. Note that in
both the case of normal language development and the case of specific
language impairment, matrix clauses interpreted to be nonfinite should not
contain filler syllables in slots usually reserved for finite auxiliary be and
copula forms. For example, if children are found using bare verb stems in
contexts such as Yesterday Tim work and Mom always read, it might be
assumed that work and read are optional infinitives. Therefore, nonfinite
options such as Mitch driving and Gus tall should also be expected, not
utterances with filler syllables as in Mitch [a] driving and Gus [a] tall. If the
latter occurred, there would be reason to doubt that nonfinite forms were
actually intended by the child. It would seem, then, that the presence or
absence of filler syllables in these contexts could constitute valuable evidence
in the evaluation of this type of account.
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