Fast mapping of verbs by children with specific language impairment

Abstract

Two studies examined preschoolers' ability to assign verb interpretations to nonsense words encountered in conjunction with novel actions. Experiment 1 examined the ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and younger, normally developing peers to glean a verb interpretation when the name of the figure performing the novel action was already known. The two groups of children performed in a similar, accurate fashion. Experiment 2 required pre-schoolers to rely exclusively on morphosyntactic information to determine whether the novel word represented an object or action. When provided with redundant morphosyntactic cues, children with SLI and language- and age-matched peers succeeded in identifying the novel words that referred to objects but not those that referred to actions. Only the age-matched normal peers were above chance levels when a noun interpretation depended on a single grammatical morpheme (e.g., 'We want the koob ' versus 'We want to koob '). The findings suggest that preschoolers, whether or not they have language impairment, have difficulty using morphosyntactic information to bootstrap verbs. Furthermore, redundant but not single morphosyntactic cues facilitate the bootstrapping of nouns.