Production of infinitival complements by children with specific language impairment

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the production of infinitival complements by children with specific language impairment (SLI) as compared with mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched children in an effort to clarify inconsistencies in the literature. Spontaneous language samples were analysed for infinitival complements (reduced infinitives and true infinitives). Participants included children with SLI (n = 19; 5;2–7;10) and children with typical language (n = 19; MLU; 3;0–5;9). There was no group difference in the number of infinitival complements and the number of different complement-taking verbs. However, the SLI group produced more true infinitives than the MLU group. The SLI group was less accurate than the MLU group on inclusion of obligatory infinitival to, with 80.21% accuracy (SD = 29.42) and 99.81% accuracy (SD = 0.85), respectively. As a group, children with SLI did not have problems with the clausal structure of infinitives. However, they had difficulty with the specific grammatical requirement of infinitival clauses, that is, the inclusion of the infinitival marker.