HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal My Folders Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Krantz, L. R. Articles by Leonard, L. B. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Krantz, L. R. Articles by Leonard, L. B. Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

The Effect of Temporal Adverbials on Past Tense Production by Children With Specific Language Impairment

Contact author: Laurence B. Leonard, Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Heavilon Hall, 500 Oval Drive, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907. E-mail: xdxl{at}purdue.edu.

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often fail to produce past tense forms in obligatory contexts, although the factors affecting such inconsistency are not well understood. This study examined the influence of accompanying temporal adverbials (e.g., just, already) on the past tense production of these children.

Method: Fifteen preschool-aged children with SLI, 15 typically developing children matched for age (TD–A) and 15 younger typically developing children matched for mean length of utterance (TD–MLU) participated in the study. The children responded to probes that obligated the use of past tense forms. The verbal context provided by the experimenter for half of the items included a temporal adverbial.

Results: Overall, the SLI and TD–MLU groups produced past tense less frequently than the children in the TD–A group, and there were no significant differences between the SLI and the TD–MLU groups. However, both the SLI and the TD–MLU participants produced past tense forms less frequently when temporal adverbials were included than when they were absent.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that the tendency to use past tense by the children with SLI and their younger MLU-matched peers may not have been independent of other types of temporal information.

KEY WORDS: preschool children, language expression, language disorders

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