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Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners
Edited by Maya Hickmann †, Edy Veneziano and Harriet Jisa
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 22] 2018
► pp. 409–426

Chapter 19
Spoken and written narratives from French- and English-speaking children with Language Impairment\

| Department of Psychology, San Diego State University | Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition et l’Apprentissage, Université de Poitiers & CNRS
| Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition et l’Apprentissage, Université de Poitiers & CNRS
| San Diego State University | Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego
| Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition et l’Apprentissage, Université de Poitiers & CNRS
| Unité de Recherche Clinique, Centre Hospitalier Henri Laborit de Poitiers
| Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University
| Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition et l’Apprentissage, Université de Poitiers & CNRS
| Laboratoire Bases, Corpus, Langage, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis & CNRS
| Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego

Children with Language Impairment (LI) show significant delays in spoken language development with persistent problems in morphology. In this chapter, we compare spoken and written narratives from children with LI and their typically developing peers (TD) in French and English. We investigate the role of modality (spoken and written language), and the contribution of language-specific factors (French and English) to the LI phenotype. We found that both French and English LI groups exhibit problems with morphology; however, they use complex syntax strategically to bring coherence to their stories. Moreover, both LI and TD children are sensitive to the pragmatic and rhetorical conventions of their linguistic communities. Our findings increase our understanding of the nature of LI, and how language-specific features and culture might affect this profile.

Keywords: language impairment, narrative, French, English, spoken and written language, morphology, complex syntax, cross-linguistic comparison
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The narrative study
  • 3.Analysis and results
    • 3.1Length
    • 3.2Morphology
    • 3.3Complex syntax
    • 3.4Syntactic depth
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Language, modality, and Language Impairment
  • Note
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 22 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.22.20rei
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