A cross-linguistic study of article use by children with specific language impairment

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often show limitations in grammatical morphology that exceed their problems in other areas of language. One factor contributing to this difficulty might be the relatively brief durations of many grammatical morphemes. In the present study, this factor was explored by examining the use of articles by a group of French-speaking children with SLI. French differs from other languages studied to date in that the differences in duration between stressed syllables and unstressed syllables, such as articles, are much smaller. The data revealed that French-speaking children with SLI used articles with relatively high percentages equivalent to those seen for a group of normally developing French-speaking children matched according to mean length of utterance. In addition, the percentages seen for the French-speaking children with SLI were substantially higher than those observed for children with SLI who were acquiring Italian and English.