Proficiency with tense and aspect concordance: children with SLI and their typically developing peers

Children with SLI have difficulty with tense and agreement morphology. This study examined the proficiency of these children and their typically developing peers with the coordination of tense and aspect markers in two-clause sentences. Scenarios designed to elicit past tense were presented to five- to eight-year-old children with SLI (n=14) and their normally developing age- and MLU-matched peers (n=24) to examine the omission of tense markers in complex sentences (Owen, 2010). Responses with overt tense/aspect morphology in both clauses were recoded for how similar the use of tense and aspect was across the two clauses. Tense and aspect concordance was high across both sentence types, but aspect-only mismatches were more common than tense mismatches. The three groups of children did not differ from each other on any comparisons. Coordination of temporal information in sentences with more than one time marker does not appear to be especially difficult for these children.