Detection of irregular verb violations by children with and without SLI

Fifty-seven children (ages in years;months: 5;7-8;8) with and without Specific Language Impairment (SLI) participated in judgment and elicitation tasks designed to evaluate their understanding of restrictions associated with irregular verb forms. The performance of the SLI group was similar to the performances of the control groups in that all children demonstrated high levels of sensitivity to violations involving verb-agreement errors (e.g., he am falling). The production and acceptance rates of past tense overregularizations (e.g., he falled) by the SLI and language-match groups were similar, and both were higher than the age-match group. Differences between affected and unaffected children were observed in their productions and relative levels of sensitivity to infinitive errors in finite positions (e.g., he fall off). As expected, children in the SLI group were more likely to produce and accept infinitive forms in finite positions. Children in the SLI group also accepted more finite form errors in VP complement positions (e.g., he made him fell) than the control groups, although the latter occurred rarely in children's productions. Implications for understanding morphophonological and morphosyntactic development in children with SLI are discussed.