Aspect markers in Cantonese-speaking children with specific language impairment

Abstract

Recent accounts of morphological deficits in children with specific language impairment contrast grammar-deficit explanations, for difficulties these children have with finite verb morphology, with accounts that appeal to processing limitations. Cross-linguistic evaluations of these accounts have not to date involved isolating languages. Here we investigate the use of verb affixes by children speaking Cantonese. Despite their lack of inflection, and especially the absence of any tense or agreement marking, Chinese languages do utilize grammatical morphemes that signal finiteness, in the form of a class of aspect markers. In this study thirteen Cantonese-speaking children with SLI and their age-matched peers completed three spoken-language tasks: a sentence-repetition task, a video narration, and a conversation. Although the two groups were similar in the ability to encode aspect in the repetition task, the age-matched peers showed greater facility in using aspectual forms in the video task and in conversation. In addition, the aspect markers used by the children with SLI were more likely to occur with verbs with cognate inherent aspect (e.g. achievement verb + perfective aspect marker), unlike their age-matched peers, who deployed perfective, imperfective, habitual, and continuous aspect markers over a range of verb types. The results are interpreted to indicate that a limited-processing-capacity account could explain the performance of these Cantonese-speaking children with language impairment.