Detection of lexical and morphological anomalies by children with and without language impairment

The abilities of 5-year-old children with and without language impairment (LI) to detect anomalies involving lexical items and grammatical morphemes in stories were compared. The influence of sentence versus discourse context on lexical anomaly detection rates was explored.

The participants were read 3 story scripts and asked to detect the anomalies embedded in them.

Typically developing (TD) children outperformed their peers with LI across the board. For both groups, lexical anomalies were easier to detect than morphological anomalies. Similarly, anomalous nouns were easier for both groups to detect compared with anomalous verbs. The latter presented a particular challenge to the children with LI. Both groups had greater difficulty with lexical anomaly detection in discourse relative to sentence context.

These outcomes suggest that children's ability to detect anomalies is sensitive to the nature of the anomaly and the linguistic context involved in anomaly detection. Future research may address the relative role of linguistic and cognitive factors in anomaly detection.