Greek Noun Pluralization in Developmentally Language-Impaired Children*

Abstract

Nominal plurals are usually either irregulars, which must be lexically stored since they are unpredictable, or regulars, which can be computed on-line using implicit grammatical rules and need not be lexically stored. Children show proficient use of their respective language’s regular plural formation rule(s) by the average age of 3;5 often also overapplying the rule to form regular plurals or irregular as well. Plural formation skills which make use of implicit language rules are best observed when challenged with novel presents subjects with a novel singular noun accompanied by a novel object and requires them to pluralize it on cue. Children who have developmental language impairments in the absence of other cognitive or physical difficulties show the following dissociation in English (Goad and Rebellati, 1994): they are able to lexically learn both irregular and regular forms but cannot form novel plurals as controls can, suggesting that for the impaired, the mechanism of regular word formation is impaired. The present study reports on a production task of Greek plural formation by non-impaired and language-impaired children, Greek plural morphology being more complex. It was hypothesized that, despite surface differences in plural formation strategies between other languages studied in this respect (e.g. English and German) and Greek, Greek impaired children, selected by the same criteria, would have the similar difficulties in forming novel plural nouns. Nine developmentally language-impaired (DLI) subjects ranging from (6;3) to (17;7), age-matched controls, and younger controls were all given a 30 real words (10 of each gender) to pluralize. Each item was presented visually and aurally along with a picture depicting each noun (real objects/items for the real words, novel objects for the novel words). Subjects were required to respond orally to the cue of two objects identical to the stimulus. Responses were recorded both manually and taped for transcription by native speakers. Results indicate that, as expected, DLI children are significantly worse at the task than either age-matched controls or younger controls. All groups performed better on real words than on novel ones. On novel words, gender differences were onserved for all three groups in that feminine nouns were most likely to be correctly formed and neuter nouns were most likely to be incorrectly formed. Non-impaired subjects showed a preference for default plural formation rules whereas DLI subjects showed no consistent use of rules in forming novel plurals; frequency of noun class and phonological shape were important factors. The results support Gopnik’s (1992, 1994) theoretical model which argues that of two ways to word use, namely, lexical access of stored forms, and on-line computing of forms using roots, affixes, and word-formation rules (Pinker, 1991), only the former is available to DLI individuals. This impairment has implications for language theory since it tends to be familiar and so the ability to form and use implicit language rules may be subserved by specific neurological mechanisms inherently impaired for up to 3% of the population.