Knowledge of binding in normal and SLI children

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Child Language Acquisition

Background:

• Properties of reflexives, including binding domain and antecedent position, vary significantly across adult languages.
• Generative Grammar (GB) theory offers various approaches to these properties, each with distinct implications for language acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the implications of GB theory on language acquisition by examining reflexive properties in children.
• To test both typically developing children and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) for binding domain and orientation properties.

Main Methods:

• Empirical testing of normal and SLI children's grammatical properties related to reflexive binding.
• Analysis of children's performance on tasks assessing the domain and antecedent requirements for reflexives.

Main Results:

• Contrary to previous assumptions, typically developing children acquiring English demonstrate a long-distance binding stage.
• Children with SLI did not exhibit this long-distance binding, instead favoring the nearest available noun phrase (NP) as the antecedent.
• This SLI pattern suggests an previously unidentified early binding stage in language development.

Conclusions:

• Findings support the 'competing grammars' model of language acquisition, where learners may hold multiple, incompatible grammatical systems simultaneously.
• The distinct patterns observed in normal and SLI children provide crucial insights into the developmental trajectory of grammatical binding.