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Grammatical morphology in school-age children with and without language impairment: a discriminant function analysis
Maura Jones Moyle1, Courtney Karasinski, Susan Ellis Weismer
1University of Wisconsin–Madison, WI, USA. maura.moyle@marquette.edu
Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools
|October 5, 2011
Summary
Verb morphology alone is not a reliable clinical marker for specific language impairment (SLI) in school-aged children. Combining verb and noun morpheme measures with mean length of utterance (MLU) improved classification accuracy for children with and without SLI.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Speech-Language Pathology
Background:
- Specific Language Impairment (SLI) affects language development in children.
- Previous research suggested verb morphemes as a potential clinical marker for SLI.
- The utility of verb morphemes as a marker for older children with SLI requires further investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To evaluate Bedore and Leonard's (1998) hypothesis regarding verb morpheme composites as a clinical marker for SLI in school-aged English speakers.
- To determine if verb morpheme composites can accurately classify children with and without SLI beyond the preschool years.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of language transcripts from 50 school-aged children with SLI and 50 typically developing peers.
- Measurement of a finite verb morpheme composite, a noun morpheme composite, and mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU(m)).
- Application of the Bedore and Leonard (1998) procedure for data analysis.
Main Results:
- Neither verb nor noun grammatical morpheme composites alone effectively discriminated between children with and without SLI at this age.
- A combined measure of verb and noun morpheme composites along with MLU(m) demonstrated good accuracy in classifying subgroups of younger school-aged children with and without SLI.
Conclusions:
- Verb morphology in isolation is not a sufficient clinical marker for identifying SLI in school-aged children.
- Combined grammatical morpheme measures and MLU(m) show promise for classifying SLI in this population.
- Further research is needed to explore explanations for these findings and refine diagnostic tools.
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