Abstract
Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) have persisting problems in the correct use of verb tense, but there has been disagreement as to the underlying reason. When we take into account studies using receptive as well as expressive language tasks, the data suggest that the difficulty for children with SLI is in knowing when to inflect verbs for tense, rather than how to do so. This is perhaps not surprising when we consider that tense does not have a transparent semantic interpretation, but depends on complex relationships between inflections and hierarchically organized clauses. An explanation in terms of syntactic limitations contrasts with a popular morpho-phonological account, the Words and Rules model. This model, which attributes problems to difficulties with applying a rule to generate regular inflected forms, has been widely applied to adult-acquired disorders. There are striking similarities in the pattern of errors in adults with anterior aphasia and children with SLI, suggesting that impairments in appreciation of when to mark tense may apply to acquired as well as developmental disorders.
Highlights
When children first learn to talk, they don’t just imitate the speech they hear: their output reflects limitations of their immature language
Problems with verb inflections are seen in typical development and are a striking feature of both developmental language disorders [1] and some types of acquired aphasia [2]
My main focus here is on English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI), a condition that is diagnosed when language is out of step with other aspects of development for no obvious reason
Summary
When children first learn to talk, they don’t just imitate the speech they hear: their output reflects limitations of their immature language. We may see overregularization of an irregular verb, such as ‘I runned home’ or ‘Mummy drived her car’. Both types of error have stimulated theorizing about the underlying nature of the child’s grammatical difficulties, but despite many years of research, there is still debate as to their origins. Problems with verb inflections are seen in typical development and are a striking feature of both developmental language disorders [1] and some types of acquired aphasia [2]. Encouraged, by the integrative spirit of this special issue, I briefly consider whether insights from the study of children might help us to understand abnormal use of verbal inflections in acquired aphasia
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