Verbs of placement in Swedish children with SLI

This study investigated lexical aspects of verb knowledge in Swedish children with specific language impairment (SLI). The type of verbs studied were those of placement, a semantic area with a language-specific differentiation in Swedish. It was hypothesized that owing to their cross-linguistic uncommonness, these verbs cause difficulties for children with SLI, that these problems are more marked in production than in comprehension, and that children with SLI show less change over time than controls. Ten children with SLI and 10 language-matched controls participated in an acting-out task testing the comprehension and production of four different verbs of placement. The children were tested on two occasions, with a 6-month interval. The groups did not differ in their performance on the comprehension task at either testing. In production, the children with SLI had significantly more difficulties in choosing the correct verb than the controls at the second testing. The controls performed significantly better on production at the second testing than at the first, whereas the children with SLI did not enhance their performance between testings. This indicates that children with SLI have lexical problems and that these problems do not diminish with time. The results are related to the results from studies of second-language learners of Swedish who often have difficulties in the usage of these verbs. The results are also related to the results from studies of the corresponding semantic field in English- and Dutch-speaking children with SLI. The comparisons show some interesting differences, depending on the type of learner and the language learned. The approach adopted seems promising. Studies of lexical specificity in children with SLI would give interesting information, useful both for the development of clinical assessment instruments and for our understanding of lexical acquisition in these children.