Case Marking in Hungarian Children with Specific Language Impairment

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Neurolinguistics

Background:

• Specific language impairment (SLI) affects language acquisition.
• Hungarian has a rich case marking system, offering a unique test case.
• Understanding SLI in morphologically complex languages is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate case marking difficulties in Hungarian children with SLI.
• To compare difficulties with spatial versus nonspatial case meanings.
• To test predictions from processing accounts of SLI.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of narrative samples from children with SLI.
• Sentence repetition tasks assessing case suffix production.
• Comparison between SLI, same-age, and younger typically developing children (VC children).

Main Results:

• Children with SLI used significantly fewer case-marked nouns and diverse case markers in spontaneous speech.
• SLI group performed significantly worse than VC children on an elicited production task.
• Both SLI and VC children performed better on spatial than nonspatial case meanings.

Conclusions:

• Children with SLI exhibit subtle, yet significant, challenges with case marking in Hungarian.
• Difficulties are more pronounced for nonspatial meanings, supporting processing load theories.
• Findings highlight the impact of grammatical complexity on SLI.