Specific Language Impairment in Children: A Comparison of English and Swedish

We report a cross-linguistic investigation of English- and Swedish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in an attempt to determine whether Wexler's (1998; 2003) (Extended) Unique Checking Constraint (EUCC) can account for the grammatical profiles of these groups of children. In Study I, a group of Swedish-speaking preschoolers with SLI showed greater use of finite verb inflections and copula forms than a group of English-speaking preschoolers with SLI, even though the two groups were carefully matched according to both age and severity of language impairment. In Study II, the same Swedish-speaking children with SLI showed high levels of appropriate verb-second use with finite verbs. However, they were less proficient in this regard than a group of younger typically developing Swedish children with similar mean lengths of utterance. The findings from both studies were generally compatible with predictions based on the EUCC. Issues in need of future investigation are discussed.