The effect of temporal adverbials on past tense production by children with specific language impairment

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often fail to produce past tense forms in obligatory contexts, although the factors affecting such inconsistency are not well understood. This study examined the influence of accompanying temporal adverbials (e.g., just, already) on the past tense production of these children.

Fifteen preschool-aged children with SLI, 15 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A) and 15 younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU) participated in the study. The children responded to probes that obligated the use of past tense forms. The verbal context provided by the experimenter for half of the items included a temporal adverbial.

Overall, the SLI and TD-MLU groups produced past tense less frequently than the children in the TD-A group, and there were no significant differences between the SLI and the TD-MLU groups. However, both the SLI and the TD-MLU participants produced past tense forms less frequently when temporal adverbials were included than when they were absent.

These findings suggest that the tendency to use past tense by the children with SLI and their younger MLU-matched peers may not have been independent of other types of temporal information.