Tense marking and spontaneous speech measures in Spanish specific language impairment: a discriminant function...

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized by difficulties in language acquisition without other cognitive impairments.
• Previous research indicates a tense deficit in children with SLI across various languages.
• The presence and diagnostic utility of a tense deficit in Spanish-speaking children with SLI remain underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether Spanish-speaking children with SLI exhibit a tense deficit similar to that observed in other languages.
• To determine if performance on tense-related measures can differentiate Spanish-speaking children with SLI from typically developing peers.

Main Methods:

• A review of existing spontaneous production, elicited production, and grammaticality judgment studies on finiteness in child Spanish.
• Correlation analysis between seven spontaneous speech measures and previous receptive/expressive finiteness measures.
• Discriminant function analysis to classify 55 monolingual Spanish-speaking children (SLI vs. typically developing) using tense measures.

Main Results:

• Spontaneous speech measures significantly correlated with prior measures indicating a tense deficit in child Spanish.
• Children with SLI scored statistically lower than typically developing children on six out of seven spontaneous speech measures.
• Tense measures, both alone and combined with spontaneous speech measures, demonstrated fair to good classification accuracy for SLI.

Conclusions:

• The findings support the hypothesis that a tense-marking deficit is present in Spanish-speaking children with SLI.
• This tense deficit serves as a potential clinical marker for identifying SLI in this population.
• Further research can refine the use of tense-related measures for SLI diagnosis in Spanish.