Grammatical Morphemes Research Articles

Testing the abstractness of children's linguistic representations: lexical and structural priming of syntactic constructions in young children

The current studies used a priming methodology to assess the abstractness of children's early syntactic constructions. In the main study, 3-, 4- and 6-year-old children were asked to describe a prime picture by repeating either an active or a passive sentence, and then they were left to their own devices to describe a target picture. For half the children at each age, the prime sentences they repeated had high lexical overlap with the sentence they were likely to produce for the target, whereas for the other half there was very low lexical overlap between prime and target. The main result was that 6-year-old children showed both lexical and structural priming for both the active transitive and passive constructions, whereas 3- and 4-year-old children showed lexical priming only. This pattern of results would seem to indicate that 6-year-old children have relatively abstract representations of these constructions, whereas 3- and 4-year-old children have as an integral part of their representations certain specific lexical items, especially pronouns and some grammatical morphemes. In a second study it was found that children did not need to repeat the prime out loud in order to be primed - suggesting that the priming effect observed concerns not just peripheral production mechanisms but underlying linguistic representations common to comprehension and production. These results support the view that young children develop abstract linguistic representations gradually during the preschool years.

A method for examining productivity of grammatical morphology in children with and without specific language impairment.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show inconsistent use of grammatical morphology. Children who are developing language typically also show a period during which they produce grammatical morphemes inconsistently. Various theories claim that both young typically developing children and children with SLI achieve correct production through memorization of some inflected forms (M. Gopnik, 1997; M. Tomasello, 2000a, 2000b). Adapting a method introduced by C. Miller and L. Leonard (1998), the authors investigated the use of present tense third singular -s by 24 typically developing preschoolers and 36 preschoolers with SLI. Each group was divided into 2 mean length of utterance (MLU) levels. Group and individual data provided little evidence that memorization could explain the correct productions of the third singular morpheme for either children with SLI or typically developing children, and there was no difference between children with higher and lower MLUs.

Grammatical morpheme effects on MLU: "the same can be less" revisited.

Studies of children with specific language impairment (SLI) often include 2 comparison groups of typically developing children--a group matched according to age and a group matched according to mean length of utterance (MLU). In these studies, both groups of typically developing children often perform better than the SLI group. For many of these investigations, grammatical morpheme use constitutes the dependent measure. The use of grammatical morphemes requires longer utterances than the failure to use these morphemes. If children with SLI show less use of grammatical morphemes than typically developing children matched for MLU, shouldn't they produce some other detail of language more frequently than the MLU-matched group? In this article, the authors report 2 studies showing that such offsetting effects are not necessary in principle, given the nature of MLU. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Attentional resource and processing speed limitations during sentence processing in Parkinson’s disease

Several studies have suggested that patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have sentence comprehension difficulty in part because of their limited executive resources. However, these assessments confound the executive resources contributing to sentence comprehension with the resources needed for task performance. In the present study, we used a word detection technique that minimizes task demands in order to evaluate attentional and processing speed resources during the comprehension of simple sentences without subordinate clauses and sentences containing subject-relative and object-relative center-embedded subordinate clauses. We found that PD patients have poor sensitivity to phonetic errors embedded in unbound grammatical morphemes, regardless of the clausal structure of the sentence, suggesting difficulty attending to grammatical morphemes. We also found that PD patients are significantly slowed in their sensitivity to phonetic errors in content words embedded in object-relative center-embedded sentences. Slowed sensitivity to content words in object-relative sentences was correlated with timed executive measures of planning. On a traditional measure of comprehension, these PD patients were impaired for sentences containing object-relative center-embedded clauses compared to sentences with subject-relative center-embedded clauses, and comprehension of object-relative sentences was correlated with executive measures. Our findings are consistent with the claim that limited executive resources for strategic attention and processing speed contribute to the sentence comprehension difficulties of PD patients.

Teaching Children with Autism Self-Initiations as a Pivotal Response

The purpose of this study was to assess whether children with autism could be taught a child-initiated query as a pivotal response to facilitate the use of grammatical morphemes. Data were collected within the context of a multiple baseline design across two children who lacked the use of temporal m

Effect of lexical cues on the production of active and passive sentences in Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia

This study compared the sentence production abilities of individuals with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia in an attempt to explore the extent to which impaired lexical retrieval impedes sentence production. The ability to produce active and passive reversible and non-reversible sentences was examined when varying amounts of lexical information was provided. The results showed that both Wernicke’s and Broca’s aphasic individuals were impaired in passive sentence production and that these difficulties were not overcome when lexical cues (the relevant nouns and uninflected verb) were provided. However when auxiliary and past tense morphemes were provided along with the verb stem, production of passive sentences improved drastically for both groups. Analysis of error patterns, however, revealed differences between the two groups, suggesting that Broca’s aphasic subjects may find passive sentences difficult due to problems with retrieving the relevant grammatical morphemes. Subjects with Wernicke’s aphasia may have been unable to automatically access the passive sentence structure.

Aspect markers in Cantonese-speaking children with specific language impairment

Recent accounts of morphological deficits in children with specific language impairment contrast grammar-deficit explanations, for difficulties these children have with finite verb morphology, with accounts that appeal to processing limitations. Cross-linguistic evaluations of these accounts have not to date involved isolating languages. Here we investigate the use of verb affixes by children speaking Cantonese. Despite their lack of inflection, and especially the absence of any tense or agreement marking, Chinese languages do utilize grammatical morphemes that signal finiteness, in the form of a class of aspect markers. In this study thirteen Cantonese-speaking children with SLI and their age-matched peers completed three spoken-language tasks: a sentence-repetition task, a video narration, and a conversation. Although the two groups were similar in the ability to encode aspect in the repetition task, the age-matched peers showed greater facility in using aspectual forms in the video task and in conversation. In addition, the aspect markers used by the children with SLI were more likely to occur with verbs with cognate inherent aspect (e.g. achievement verb + perfective aspect marker), unlike their age-matched peers, who deployed perfective, imperfective, habitual, and continuous aspect markers over a range of verb types. The results are interpreted to indicate that a limited-processing-capacity account could explain the performance of these Cantonese-speaking children with language impairment.

Desano Grammar (review)

Reviewed by: Desano grammar by Marion Miller Søren Wichmann Desano grammar. By Marion Miller. (Studies in the languages of Columbia 6.) Dallas: The Summer Institute of Linguistics & The University of Texas at Arlington, 1999. Pp. xi, 178. $25.00. This grammar of a Tukanoan language is the result of work among the Desanos of eastern Columbia [End Page 804] principally during 1963–1984. The author indicates that the work was influenced by an unpublished 1992 Field manual for descriptive linguistics by Thomas Payne. Brief overviews of constituent order typology and phonology are followed by chapters on parts of speech, the noun phrase, case, the verb phrase, valence changing operations, sentence structure, question formation, negation, subordination, and pragmatic considerations. The description shows Desano to be an accusative SOV language with a rich agglutinative morphology. Noun morphology is sensitive to animacy distinctions. Specific direct objects and experiencers receive the same case marker and locational terms another, leaving the rest of the nominal constituents unmarked. There is a large set of noun classifiers (but too little said about how they work). The set of true adjectives is very small; in the majority of cases deverbalizations of stative verbs handle the need to form descriptive expressions. The verb carries agreement markers for person, number, gender, and animacy of the subject and markers for such categories as tense and evidentiality; it allows for a great deal of compounding and for incorporation of both subject and object nouns. Among the valence changing mechanisms are three different types of causative formations, a morphological benefactive, and a passive. Desano appears to make extensive use of what is variously known as external possession or possessor ascension. Different kinds of subordination are handled by nominalization. Finally, it may be mentioned that Desano has canonical switch reference. The presentation emphasizes typological considerations more than language-specific ones and seems to give an equal weight to morphology and syntax. Nevertheless, the book actually reads as a morphology-in-disguise with discussions and illustrations of each morpheme placed under whatever premeditated chapter heading was available. Given this emphasis, a brief overview of the total morphological layout and/or an index of grammatical morphemes would have been useful, as would other deviations from the generic format that might allow for more in-depth treatments of phenomena of particular prominence in the language. It is lamentable that the author chose to only mark stress ‘where it is needed to distinguish meaning’ (9), that is where, to the author’s knowledge, the form enters into some minimal pair with respect to stress, and to always cite words with the morphemes in what the author considers to be their underlying form ‘[f]or easier reading of examples’ (9). The first decision means needlessly throwing away important information, and the latter decision could only be justified if there were an exhaustive treatment of morphophonemics, which is not the case. It is hoped that these shortcomings will be remedied in Marion Miller’s forthcoming Desano dictionary. For readers who are interested in the ideological underpinnings of linguistic examples, the book offers translation sentences such as: ‘We should tell our children God’s Word’ (90), where ‘we’ is marked for the inclusive. Søren Wichmann University of Copenhagen Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

Typical Features of Austronesian Languages in Central/Eastern Indonesia

Typical Features of Austronesian Languages in Central/Eastern Indonesia1 Marian Klamer Abstract This paper presents a list of typical properties of the languages of Central/Eastern (C/E) Indonesia, covering roughly the geographical area between Lombok and Papua. It focuses on those characteristics that set apart the C/E Indonesian languages from the Austronesian languages toward the west. A synthesis of recently published data on C/E Indonesian languages, the present paper provides an updated typological window on an area that is relatively under-represented in Austronesian research. It is argued that a typological characterization of a linguistic area like this can be used as a heuristic tool in comparative research. Because the area under consideration is geographically defined, the data do not have any direct bearing on issues of genetic subgrouping. Nevertheless, because all but one of the features listed here are those of Austronesian languages, they may be used to formulate hypotheses about the higher-order genetic affiliation of a language whose affiliation to a particular family (e.g., whether Austronesian or not) is yet uncertain. This is especially relevant for C/E Indonesia as a contact zone of languages with different (or unknown) genetic affiliations. How the list of typological features may be used to formulate specific hypotheses about contact-induced linguistic change is illustrated. 1. Introduction. This paper presents an initial typological characterization of the languages of the Central/Eastern (C/E) Indonesian region, roughly covering the geographical area east of Lombok and west of Papua. The core sample of languages referred to in this paper are the Austronesian languages Muna (Sulawesi, Van den Berg 1989), Tukang Besi (Sulawesi, Donohue 1999), Bima (Owens 2000), Kéo (Flores, Baird 2002), Kambera (Sumba, Klamer [End Page 363] 1998a), Buru (Moluccas, Grimes 1991), Alune (Moluccas, Florey 2001), Leti (Moluccas, east of Timor, Van Engelenhoven 1995), Teun, Nila, and Serua (Moluccas, NE of Timor, Van Engelenhoven, to appear), Fehan Tetun (Timor, Van Klinken 1999), Taba (Halmahera, Bowden 2001), and Biak (N of the Bird's Head, Steinhauer, to appear). The locations where these languages are spoken are indicated on the map in figure 1. There are several ways in which an overview such as this may be useful for Austronesian linguistic research. First, because it is a synthesis of data on C/E Indonesian languages that have become available in the past decade, it presents an updated typological window on C/E Indonesian languages. Second, existing typological characterizations of Austronesian incorporate either the characteristics of Western Austronesian and Oceanic languages (e.g., Clark 1990, Tryon 1995), or of the Austronesian languages in Papua and Papua New Guinea (e.g., Voorhoeve 1994, Ross 1996, Foley 1998). The typical characteristics of C/E Indonesian languages do not feature in these overviews. The list of features presented here may be used to fill this gap in our typological picture of Austronesian languages. Third, a typological overview of a linguistic area can be used as a heuristic tool in comparative research. Traditionally, most of the comparative research in Austronesian linguistics has a diachronic orientation: it aims at the establishment of genetic Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Location of Core Sample of Languages Discussed in this Paper [End Page 364] relations between languages, and the reconstruction of protoforms. This paper, however, takes a synchronic approach to comparative research by making typological and areal comparisons. In this context, it is important to point out that synchronic and diachronic comparison are mutually dependent rather than competitive approaches. For example, although genetic relationships are established by the classical comparative method, it is also well known that "the comparative method is not a heuristic: ... when applied to vocabulary, it does not demonstrate relatedness, but simply assumes relatedness and proceeds to describe the relationships between the daughter languages" (Nichols 1996:40, emphasis mine). The classical comparative method, then, is a means to demonstrate an already existing hypothesis of genetic relationship through cognate paradigms of grammatical morphemes and sets of cognate lexical items (cf. Thomason and Kaufman 1988:201-202, Ross 1996). In other words, before the comparative method can be applied to unknown or unclassified languages, we must have a way to come to an...

Oneida-English/English-Oneida dictionary

Oneida is an endangered Iroquoian language spoken fluently by fewer than 250 people. This is the first comprehensive dictionary of the Oneida language as used in Ontario, where most of the surviving speakers reside. The dictionary contains both Oneida-English and English-Oneida sections. The Oneida-English portion includes some 6000 entries, presenting lexical bases, particles and grammatical morphemes. Each entry for a base shows several forms; illustrates inflection, meaning and use; and gives details regarding pronunciation and cultural significance. The English-Oneida entries direct the reader to the relevant base in the Oneida-English section, where technical information is provided. Completing the volume is a set of appendices that organizes Oneida words into thematic categories. The Iroquoian languages have an unusually complex word structure, in which lexical bases are surrounded by layers of prefixes and suffixes. This dictionary presents and explains that structure in the clearest possible terms. A work of enormous precision and care, it incorporates many innovative ideas and shows a deep understanding of the nature of the Oneida language.

Typical and Atypical Language Development in Infants and Toddlers Adopted From Eastern Europe

Longitudinal language development data were collected on 130 infants and toddlers adopted from Eastern Europe. The children were followed by means of parent surveys from the age at adoption up through age 36–40 months. The surveys collected data on expressive vocabulary growth, mean length of the three longest utterances, and development of four bound grammatical morphemes. Additional language data were collected using a modified version of the Rossetti Infant-Toddler Language Scale (1990). A multivariate factor analysis found no significant correlation between preadoption medical and developmental risk factors and eventual language development outcomes. The majority of children acquired English using the same developmental trajectories as nonadopted peers. By age 36–40 months, children adopted at younger ages had fully caught up to English language norms. Children adopted at older ages lagged behind, with the length of delay related to age at adoption. On the basis of these data, clinical guidelines are provided for assessing and treating speech and language disorders in internationally adopted children.

Grammatical morpheme production in 4-year-old children.

Despite the importance of grammatical morpheme (GM) production for both clinical decision-making and theoretical accounts of child language impairment, evidence concerning developmental expectations for GM use is inadequate. We studied grammatical morpheme production in 15-minute spontaneous language samples from a large (N = 100), sociodemographically diverse group of 4-year-olds. Substantial variability was observed in both the frequency of obligatory contexts (OCs) and in the percentage of correct usage of GMs. For only one morpheme did all 100 samples contain the minimum number of 3 OCs; for only 7 of the 14 GMs was an adequate number of OCs found in at least half of the 100 samples. Although mean percentages of production from samples with 3 or more OCs were high (> 85%), fewer than 25% of participants contributed to the "group" means for 6 of the 14 GMs. Results from the present investigation indicate a need for caution in interpreting information on GM production derived from samples of this nature from children at this age; the validity of using such data to identify deficits in inflectional morphology for either clinical or research purposes appears questionable.

Italian children's use of verb and noun morphology during the preschool years

Five groups of Italian-speaking children ages 2 to 7 years participated in tasks designed to assess their use of a range of grammatical morphemes. Present tense verb inflections and noun plural inflections reached ceiling levels by 4 years of age, whereas present tense copula forms and definite singular articles showed high accuracy levels by 5 years of age. Errors on present tense inflections were rarely infinitives. Instead, most errors could be characterized as ‘near misses’ – productions of forms that differed from the target by a single feature of person or number. Many of these one-feature errors were directional; first person forms were more likely to be replaced by third person forms than the reverse, and plural forms were more likely to be substituted by singular forms than the opposite pattern. Errors of this type are not handled by models of grammatical development that deal with broader constructs such as the availability or optionality of tense or finiteness.

Profiles of grammatical morphology and sentence imitation in children with specific language impairment and Down syndrome.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the grammatical morphology and sentence imitation performance of two different groups of children with language impairment and to compare their performance with that of children learning language typically. Expressive use of tense-bearing and non-tense-related grammatical morphemes was explored. Children with specific language impairment (SLI), with Down syndrome (DS), and with typical language development (TL) were matched on mean length of utterance (MW). Performance was compared primarily on composite measures of tense, tense inflections, and non-tense morphemes, as well as on the Sentences subtest of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R; D. Wechsler, 1989). Exploratory analyses were completed on a set of 11 individual grammatical morphemes as a follow-up to the principal analyses. As predicted, the children with SLI performed significantly more poorly than the children with TL on all three composite measures. In addition, the DS group exhibited significantly weaker performance than did the TL group on the tense inflections and non-tense morpheme composites. Although there were no statistically reliable differences between the SLI and DS groups on any morpheme measure, the groups were not comparably weak in their use of the regular post, -ed; the irregular third person singular morphemes (e.g., has, does); the present progressive, -ing; or the use of modals. The SLI and DS groups both performed more poorly than did the TL group on the sentence imitation task.

Production of grammatical morphemes in Cantonese aphasia

Background: The manifestation of impaired production of closed-class morphemes in Chinese aphasia has been examined in recent years (Lu, 1994; Packard, 1990, 1993; Tzeng, Chen, & Hung, 1991; Yiu & Worrall, 1996). However, these studies employed tasks that either allowed the patients to use avoidance strategies to conceal their impairment or modelled the target morphemes and thus provided cues to the patient. Hence, a contextually highly constrained task was used in this study. Aims: This study aimed at confirming previous observations regarding continuity across clinical types in grammatical morpheme production, dissociable performances among markers of the same morpheme category and among homophonous functors serving different functions, and to identify factors determining the accessibility of grammatical morphemes. Methods & Procedures: The Cloze test without modelling of target morphemes was employed. A wide range of functors were examined including: aspect markers; negative markers; classifiers with sub-types of verbal, sortal, container, and collective classifiers; pronouns encompassing personal, predicative, and adverbial pronouns; coverbs; structural particles including the nominative, adjectival, and adverbial particles, and one modal particle; and structural suffixes including one associated with descriptive complements and one with resultative complements. Six fluent and four non-fluent Cantonese-speaking aphasic patients were involved. They suffered either a head trauma or a unilateral left CVA at least 6 months prior to the first test session. Outcomes & Results: The main findings were largely consistent with previous reports: (1) Pronouns, coverbs, structural and modal particles, and structural suffixes presented greater difficulty to the patients than aspect markers, negative markers and classifiers. (2) Dissociations in performance were found among different members of the same category and between homophonous morphemes serving different functions. (3) Performances of the fluent and non-fluent groups differed quantitatively rather than qualitatively, with better performance on all categories by the fluent group. (4) Neither substitutions nor omissions dominated the error patterns of either aphasia group. Conclusions: The results confirm previous observations that the difference between fluent and non-fluent aphasic patients with regard to the production of grammatical morphemes is non-categorical, and that morphemes of the same category and homophonous markers of different functions may present different degrees of difficulty to the patients. Furthermore, factors including global vs local relationships, conceptual complexity, semantic value, frequency of occurrence, and optionality of occurrence may help determine the relative accessibility of functors.

The syntax of single words: Evidence from a patient with a selective function word reading deficit

We describe the reading performance of a patient who has selective deficits for reading nonwords, function words, and morphologically complex words in isolation. His reading of highly abstract nouns and verbs, however, is relatively well preserved. He can recognise and comprehend the meaning of written function words, of derivational morphology, and of most inflectional morphology. We suggest that his deficit in reading grammatical morphemes is unrelated to his problems in reading nonwords and cannot be explained by their low semanticity and imageability. The patient's speech is ungrammatical but is not devoid of grammatical morphemes and his reading of functional elements improves when these are presented within the context of sentences. We argue that syntactic information relevant to individual lexical items including information about how the word may potentially be used within a phrase must be accessed during single word reading tasks (e.g., Levelt, 1989). This is particularly difficult for function words due to their linguistic specification, which is different from that of lexical categories (Chomsky, 1995). Both linguistic theory and Garrett's (e.g., 1982) model of sentence processing account for the patient's improved reading of function words in the context of sentences.

Fast mapping of verbs by children with specific language impairment

Two studies examined preschoolers' ability to assign verb interpretations to nonsense words encountered in conjunction with novel actions. Experiment 1 examined the ability of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and younger, normally developing peers to glean a verb interpretation when the name of the figure performing the novel action was already known. The two groups of children performed in a similar, accurate fashion. Experiment 2 required pre-schoolers to rely exclusively on morphosyntactic information to determine whether the novel word represented an object or action. When provided with redundant morphosyntactic cues, children with SLI and language- and age-matched peers succeeded in identifying the novel words that referred to objects but not those that referred to actions. Only the age-matched normal peers were above chance levels when a noun interpretation depended on a single grammatical morpheme (e.g., 'We want the koob ' versus 'We want to koob '). The findings suggest that preschoolers, whether or not they have language impairment, have difficulty using morphosyntactic information to bootstrap verbs. Furthermore, redundant but not single morphosyntactic cues facilitate the bootstrapping of nouns.

Implications of abstract grammatical structure

This paper argues that the motivation for structure in creole formation comes from the innate architecture of language competence and production. In this architecture, the lexical and the grammatical subsystems of language are related, but supported differently. At the level of the mental lexicon, abstract entries (lemmas) underlie morphemes, but lemmas project content morphemes differently than grammatical morphemes. While the abstract frames that grammatical morphemes will fill are present at this level (referred to in lemmas supporting content morphemes) the grammatical morphemes are not salient until the level of the Formulator. The Formulator assembles surface-level constituents based on directions it receives from lemmas. This view of abstract configurations in language supports the claim that there are two initial targets in creole formation. These targets are: (1) input from substrates as a target for the grammatical (morphosyntactic) frame of utterances, and (2) superstrate input as another target for most of the content morphemes that appear in the creole as lexical elements or that are reconfigured to fill requirements of the grammatical frame. Thus, the overall claim is that the initial form of a creole is constrained by universally-present blueprinting of how linguistic elements are related and how they become available.

Verbs: some properties and their consequences for agrammatic Broca's aphasia

It has repeatedly been shown that agrammatic Broca's aphasics have serious problems with the retrieval of verbs on action naming tests ( Miceli, Silveri, Villa & Caramazza, 1984; Kohn, Lorch & Pearson, 1989; Basso, Razzano, Faglioni & Zanobio, 1990; Jonkers, 1998; Kim & Thompson, 2000). Less attention has been paid to the production of verbs at the sentence level (but see Miceli, Mazzuchi, Menn & Goodglass, 1983; Thompson, Shapiro, Li & Schendel, 1995; Thompson, Lange, Schneider & Shapiro, 1997; Bastiaanse & Van Zonneveld, 1998; Bastiaanse, Rispens & Van Zonneveld, 2000; Friedmann, 2000), although it has been mentioned that in agrammatic spontaneous speech verbs are lacking ( Saffran, Berndt & Schwartz, 1989; Thompson et al., 1995, but see Bastiaanse & Jonkers, 1998). In this paper, three cross-linguistic studies are discussed to show that these problems with verbs have consequences for other grammatical morphemes and structures that have been mentioned to be impaired in agrammatic speech and that these consequences are different per language, depending on linguistic characteristics. The first study focuses on finiteness and compares the production of finite verbs in matrix and embedded clauses in Dutch and English, showing that a linguistic rule in Dutch (Verb Second), which does not exist in English, can explain the different performance of Dutch and English agrammatic Broca's aphasics. The second study focuses on determiners and (finite) verbs in German and shows that poor determiner production is directly related to poor verb production. The last study demonstrates that the ability to construct negative sentences is dependent on the language specific relation between verb movement and negation: Dutch and Norwegian agrammatics perform equally well on affirmative and negative sentences, whereas English and Spanish agrammatics are more impaired on negative sentences. Overall, these studies show that the problems agrammatics encounter with verbs and their properties have a spin-off on the production of other word-classes and that the characterization ‘problems with grammatical morphemes’ is too general for telegraphic speech.

The Morphosyntax of Specific Language Impairment in French: An Extended Optional Default Account

This study examines the use of tense, agreement, and non-tense morphemes and associated distributional contingencies in the language production of Quebec French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally developing language and age-matched controls. We sought to determine whether the Optional Infinitive/Extended Optional Infinitive (OI/EOI; e.g., Rice & Wexler (1996)) pattern of normal and impaired developmental language in English occurs in French as well. In so doing, we also sought to explore the possibility that certain kinds of finite verb forms can pattern as root infinitives in some languages including French. Our results indicate that SLI in French has the majority of the EOI characteristics displayed in English SLI, such as variable use of tense-marking morphemes combined with accuracy of form choice, obedience to distributional contingencies associated with finiteness, and relatively nonvariable use of non-tense grammatical morphemes. Our results also provide support for French SLI being an extension of an earlier stage in normal development. Furthermore, our analyses reveal that the finite verb stem in French appears to act as a root infinitive along side the nonfinite verb forms. Accordingly, we suggest that the (Extended) Optional Infinitive account could be renamed the (Extended) Optional Default account in order to include certain finite forms as well as nonfinite forms as root infinitives.