Selected syntactic usage of language-impaired children

The syntactic performance of ten language-impaired and ten normal children, matched by mean length of utterance was compared. Language samples were analyzed with respect to grammatical marker need index (GMN), grammatical marker error index (GME), and GMEs for nouns (GME-N), verbs (GME-V), bound (GME-B), and unbound (GME-U) forms. The distribution of syntactic errors for nine syntactic categories was also explored. There was no significance between the groups for GMN; significant between-group differences were found for GME, GME-N versus GME-V, and GME-B versus GME-U. For all children, noun-related forms elicited fewer errors than verb-related forms; no differences were found between bound and unbound elements. The distribution of errors for the syntactic categories revealed that significant differences were not found between the groups. More errors were made with articles than pronouns and with contractible auxiliaries than contractible copulas. The results are discussed in terms of the nature of the syntactic impairments in language-impaired children and clinical implications.