Problems with tense marking in children with specific language impairment: not how but when

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Neurolinguistics

Background:

• Specific language impairment (SLI) often involves persistent difficulties with verb tense usage in children.
• The underlying cause of these verb tense deficits in SLI has been a subject of debate.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the nature of verb tense difficulties in children with SLI.
• To compare the error patterns in children with SLI to those observed in adults with aphasia.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of receptive and expressive language tasks in children with SLI.
• Comparison of error patterns between children with SLI and adults with anterior aphasia.

Main Results:

• Children with SLI appear to struggle with knowing *when* to inflect verbs for tense, rather than *how* to produce the inflections.
• Similar error patterns observed in children with SLI and adults with anterior aphasia regarding tense marking.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that the difficulty lies in understanding the complex syntactic and semantic rules governing tense, not in morpho-phonological processing.
• Impairments in the appreciation of *when* to mark tense may be a common factor in both developmental (SLI) and acquired (aphasia) language disorders.