Interpreting deficits in grammatical morphology in specifically language-impaired children: Preliminary evidence from Hebrew

Abstract

Preliminary data from seven Hebrew-speaking specifically language-impaired children (aged 4;4 to 5;3) were examined to evaluate alternative explanations of cross-linguistic differences among children with specific language impairment. The Hebrew-speaking specifically language-impaired children were found to make considerably greater use of grammatical morphemes than seven English-speaking specifically language-impaired children (aged 3;6 to 6;9) showing comparable mean utterance length measured in words. However, the Hebrew-speaking children with specific language impairment were not without limitations in morphology; relative to seven younger, normally developing Hebrew-speaking children (aged 2;4 to 3;3) matched for mean utterance length measured in morphemes, these children exhibited deficiencies with certain grammatical morphemes. The data suggest that the rich morphology of Hebrew gives Hebrew-speaking specifically language-impaired children an advantage over their English-speaking counterparts. However, even within Hebrew, specifically language-impaired children may have special difficulty with grammatical morphemes of low perceptual salience.