Cognitive state verbs and complement clauses in children with SLI and their typically developing peers
Amanda J Owen Van Horne1, Shanju Lin
1Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Iowa, 250 Hawkins Drive, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. amanda-owen@uiowa.edu
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics
|July 7, 2011
Summary
Children with specific language impairment (SLI) use fewer cognitive state verbs (CSVs) and complement clauses, indicating lexical limitations rather than syntactic deficits.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Child Language Acquisition
Background:
- Specific language impairment (SLI) affects language development in children.
- Cognitive state verbs (CSVs) and complement clauses are complex linguistic structures.
- Understanding CSV and complement clause use is crucial for diagnosing language impairments.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the use of CSVs and complement clauses in children with SLI compared to typically developing (TD) peers.
- To determine if deficits in CSV and complement clause use are related to lexical knowledge or syntactic abilities.
- To analyze verb diversity and frequency in relation to complement clause use across different contexts.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of conversational and narrative/expository samples from children with SLI and TD peers.
- Quantification of CSV use, verb types, and co-occurrence with complement clauses.
- Comparison of performance across age-matched and vocabulary-matched TD groups.
Main Results:
- No significant differences were found between groups in Study 1 across most measures.
- Study 2 revealed that children with SLI used fewer different verbs and were less likely to combine low-frequency verbs with complement clauses.
- Conversational samples elicited more high-frequency verbs, while narrative/expository samples elicited more low-frequency verbs.
Conclusions:
- Deficits in CSV and complement clause use in children with SLI are likely due to limitations in lexical knowledge.
- The findings suggest that language impairments in SLI may stem from word retrieval and lexical diversity issues.
- Interventions for SLI should consider addressing lexical depth and verb network organization.
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