The semantics of the tense deficit in child Spanish SLI

John Grinstead | The Ohio State University

Dan McCurley | The Ohio State University

Teresa Pratt | The Ohio State University

Patrick Obregon | The Ohio State University

Blanca Flores | El Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitación

Children with SLI manifest difficulties with tense, however it is not clear whether it is limited to morphosyntax or extends to semantics. Typically-developing children show a bias towards using the telicity of predicates to guide their use of grammatical aspect and tense – possibly for information processing reasons (Wagner 2009). Using a comprehension experiment, with a sample of 53 monolingual Spanish-speaking children, 20 of whom are diagnosed with SLI, we investigate the degree to which children with SLI follow this pattern. Our results show that they do not, confirming for Spanish the English findings of Leonard et al. (2007) and Leonard and Deevy (2010), and suggesting that SLI is a deficit not only of the morphology and syntax of tense, but also of its semantics. Keywords: finiteness; tense; SLI; child language; Spanish; aspect first hypothesis; comprehension; optional infinitive

Published online: 18 April 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.54.05gri

Cited by

Cited by other publications

Schulz, Petra

2018. In Semantics in Language Acquisition [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 24], ► pp. 124 ff.

Yarbay Duman, Tuba & Seyhun Topbaş

2016. Epistemic uncertainty: Turkish children with specific language impairment and their comprehension of tense and aspect. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 51:6 ► pp. 732 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 december 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.