Grammatical Morpheme Effects on Sentence Processing by School-Aged Adolescents with Specific Language Impairment

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and Nonspecific Language Impairment (NLI) affect language development.
• Adolescent language processing in these groups is not fully understood.
• Grammatical error detection is a key indicator of language proficiency.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate sentence processing in adolescents with SLI, NLI, and typical development (TD).
• To examine response times (RTs) to grammatical errors, specifically tense/agreement omissions.
• To explore persistent difficulties in adolescent language acquisition.

Main Methods:

• Participants included 16-year-olds with SLI, NLI, and TD.
• Sentence completion task with grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
• Measurement of response times (RTs) to target words following errors.

Main Results:

• TD participants showed slower RTs with grammatical errors.
• SLI and NLI groups also showed slowing, except when tense/agreement inflections were omitted.
• This pattern resembles earlier developmental stages in SLI/NLI.

Conclusions:

• Adolescents with SLI/NLI may exhibit persistent subtle difficulties with tense/agreement morphology.
• The findings suggest a continued challenge with grammatical inflection processing into adolescence.
• Response patterns indicate a unique developmental trajectory in language impairment.