Erscheinungsweisen der spezifischen Sprachentwicklungsstörung im Sprachvergleich - sprachübergreifende oder sprachunabhängige Merkmale?

Abstract

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) has been identified in many different languages. Crosslinguistic studies are important in order to disentangle universal versus language-specific phenomena in language development. For impaired language acquisition, they help to identify universal hallmarks of SLI as well as weak, vulnerable areas, which may be influenced by structural characteristics of the native language. The present study focuses on naming and comprehension of nouns and verbs in German and Korean children with SLI. Participants are 10 German and 10 Korean SLI-children. The control groups consist of 10 German/Korean age-matched children. The method was an off-line picture naming task and a word comprehension task. Target stimuli were 28 nouns and 28 verbs, identical in the two languages. In the analysis, effects of language, group (SLI/controls), word class (noun/verb) and modality were investigated. The results indicate strong language-general profiles: in both languages, SLI children's lexical abilities are significantly below age-appropriate levels. Their problems are most evident in the naming condition, e.g., word production is more severely impaired than word comprehension. However, nouns and verbs were affected similarly; the findings do not support a selective verb deficit.