Error Type and Lexical Frequency Effects: Error Detection in Swedish Children With Language Impairment

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Language impairment (LI) in children often presents with morphosyntactic difficulties.
• Previous research on error detection in LI has not fully explored the role of lexical frequency.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate morphosyntactic error detection in Swedish-speaking school-age children with LI.
• To examine the influence of lexical frequency on error detection in these children.

Main Methods:

• Compared error sensitivity for vulnerable grammatical structures (noun phrases, past tense) versus a control error (plural).
• Manipulated lexical frequency (high vs. low) and noun gender (common vs. neuter) within target structures.
• Utilized auditory presentation of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with button-press responses.

Main Results:

• Children with LI showed reduced sensitivity to past-tense and noun phrase errors compared to controls.
• All children demonstrated lexical frequency effects for verb errors (high-frequency > low-frequency).
• Noun gender affected noun phrase error detection (common > neuter).

Conclusions:

• Subtle morphosyntactic processing deficits may persist into school age for children with LI.
• Lexical frequency is a significant factor in morphosyntactic processing and has implications for clinical assessment.