The use of negative inflections by Finnish-speaking children with and without specific language impairment

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty expressing subject-verb agreement. However, in many languages, tense is fused with agreement, making it difficult to attribute the problem to agreement in particular. In Finnish, negative markers are function words that agree with the subject in person and number but do not express tense, providing an opportunity to assess the status of agreement in a more straightforward way. Fifteen Finnish-speaking preschoolers with SLI, 15 age controls and 15 younger controls responded to items requiring negative markers in first person singular and plural, and third person singular and plural. The children with SLI were less accurate than both typically developing groups. However, their problems were limited to particular person-number combinations. Furthermore, the children with SLI appeared to have difficulty selecting the form of the lexical verb that should accompany the negative marker, suggesting that agreement was not the sole difficulty.