Grammatical deficits in German and English: a crosslinguistic study of children with specific language impairment

Abstract

Children with specific language impairment acquiring German and English were compared in terms of their use of articles, third person singular verb inflections, and copula forms. The German- speaking children showed higher degrees of appropriate use of third singular inflections and copula forms, but not articles. Verb errors in the form of bare stems outnumbered other types of errors even in the data for German. Of the four accounts of grammatical deficits in specific language impairment considered, one based on the morphological richness of the target language appears most consistent with the findings.