Grammatical Tense Deficits in Children With SLI and Nonspecific Language Impairment

Relationships With Nonverbal IQ Over Time

mabel{at}ku.edu

The relationship between children's language acquisition and their nonverbal intelligence has a long tradition of scientific inquiry. Current attention focuses on the use of nonverbal IQ level as an exclusionary criterion in the definition of specific language impairment (SLI). Grammatical tense deficits are known as a clinical marker of SLI, but the relationship with nonverbal intelligence below the normal range has not previously been systematically studied. This study documents the levels of grammatical tense acquisition (for third-person singular -s, regular and irregular past tense morphology) in a large, epidemiologically ascertained sample of kindergarten children that comprises 4 groups: 130 children with SLI, 100 children with nonspecific language impairments (NLI), 73 children with low cognitive levels but language within normal limits (LC), and 117 unaffected control children. The study also documents the longitudinal course of acquisition for the SLI and NLI children between the ages of 6 and 10 years. The LC group did not differ from the unaffected controls at kindergarten, showing a dissociation of nonverbal intelligence and grammatical tense marking, so that low levels of nonverbal intelligence did not necessarily yield low levels of grammatical tense. The NLI group's level of performance was lower than that of the SLI group and showed a greater delay in resolution of the overgeneralization phase of irregular past tense mastery, indicating qualitative differences in growth. Implications for clinical groupings for research and clinical purposes are discussed.

KEY WORDS: specific language impairment, language disorders in children, language disorders in mental retardation, grammatical tense marker, nonspecific language impairment

Submitted on February 3, 2003
Revised on August 31, 2003
Accepted on November 18, 2003

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Facebook    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				L. M. Hoffman The Utility of School-Age Narrative Microstructure Indices: INMIS and the Proportion of Restricted Utterances Lang Speech Hear Serv Sch, October 1, 2009; 40(4): 365 - 375. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				L. H. Finestack and M. E. Fey Evaluation of a Deductive Procedure to Teach Grammatical Inflections to Children With Language Impairment Am J Speech Lang Pathol, August 1, 2009; 18(3): 289 - 302. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				M. S. C. Thomas, D. Annaz, D. Ansari, G. Scerif, C. Jarrold, and A. Karmiloff-Smith Using Developmental Trajectories to Understand Developmental Disorders J Speech Lang Hear Res, April 1, 2009; 52(2): 336 - 358. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				E. Thordardottir Language-Specific Effects of Task Demands on the Manifestation of Specific Language Impairment: A Comparison of English and Icelandic J Speech Lang Hear Res, August 1, 2008; 51(4): 922 - 937. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				M. L. Rice, C. L. Taylor, and S. R. Zubrick Language Outcomes of 7-Year-Old Children With or Without a History of Late Language Emergence at 24 Months J Speech Lang Hear Res, April 1, 2008; 51(2): 394 - 407. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				J. R. Price, J. E. Roberts, E. A. Hennon, M. C. Berni, K. L. Anderson, and J. Sideris Syntactic Complexity During Conversation of Boys With Fragile X Syndrome and Down Syndrome J Speech Lang Hear Res, February 1, 2008; 51(1): 3 - 15. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				S. R. Zubrick, C. L. Taylor, M. L. Rice, and D. W. Slegers Late Language Emergence at 24 Months: An Epidemiological Study of Prevalence, Predictors, and Covariates J Speech Lang Hear Res, December 1, 2007; 50(6): 1562 - 1592. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				T. Zhang and C. Formby Effects of Cueing in Auditory Temporal Masking J Speech Lang Hear Res, June 1, 2007; 50(3): 564 - 575. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				E. T. Thordardottir and M. Namazi Specific Language Impairment in French-Speaking Children: Beyond Grammatical Morphology J Speech Lang Hear Res, June 1, 2007; 50(3): 698 - 715. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				J. W. Montgomery and L. B. Leonard Effects of Acoustic Manipulation on the Real-Time Inflectional Processing of Children With Specific Language Impairment J Speech Lang Hear Res, December 1, 2006; 49(6): 1238 - 1256. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				M. L. Rice, S. M. Redmond, and L. Hoffman Mean Length of Utterance in Children With Specific Language Impairment and in Younger Control Children Shows Concurrent Validity and Stable and Parallel Growth Trajectories. J Speech Lang Hear Res, August 1, 2006; 49(4): 793 - 808. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]