Specific language impairment in a morphologically complex agglutinative Indian language-Kannada
Shivani Tiwari1, Prathibha Karanth2, B Rajashekar3
1Department of Speech and Hearing, School of Allied Health Sciences (SOAHS), Manipal University, Manipal, Karnataka, India.
Journal of Communication Disorders
|April 2, 2017
Summary
Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Kannada agglutinative languages supports the morphological richness theory. Children with SLI showed some shared deficits but excelled in syntactic morphology compared to English-learning peers.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Speech-Language Pathology
Background:
- Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is understudied in morphologically complex languages like Kannada.
- Dravidian languages offer unique insights into SLI theories due to their agglutinative nature.
- Existing research on SLI in Dravidian languages is limited.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Kannada-speaking children.
- To test the predictions of the morphological richness theory versus the Computational Grammatical Complexity (CGC) hypothesis.
- To identify distinct profiles of SLI in the context of an agglutinative language.
Main Methods:
- A group of 15 Kannada-speaking children with SLI (CwSLI) was studied.
- Performance of CwSLI was compared to language-matched peers without SLI.
- Non-word repetition tasks were used to assess phonological processing.
Main Results:
- Data supported the morphological richness theory, indicating spared syntactic morphology in CwSLI.
- Five distinct SLI profiles were identified among Kannada-speaking CwSLI.
- Kannada-learning CwSLI showed shared phonological processing deficits but not syntactic morphology deficits compared to English-learning CwSLI.
Conclusions:
- The morphological richness theory is supported by findings in Kannada.
- Kannada-learning CwSLI demonstrate unique profiles compared to English-learning CwSLI.
- Language typology significantly impacts the manifestation of SLI.
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