The acquisition of past tense in preschool children with specific language impairment and unaffected controls: Regular and irregular forms

Ludovica Serratrice, Kate L. Joseph, Gina Conti-Ramsden

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    The main aim of this study was to provide an analysis of the acquisition of past tense in preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) and unaffected controls. Data from three children with SLI, two boys and one girl, aged 3;1, 3;5, and 4;0 at the beginning of the study, formed the basis of the investigation. These children were audiorecorded for an hour in free play sessions with their mothers at fortnightly intervals for a period of approximately ten months. For comparison purposes eleven MLU-matched children were selected from the Manchester corpus (Theakston et al 2001) available on CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000) to form an unaffected control group. The findings of the present study indicated that, contrary to previously reported investigations, these younger children's attempts at marking finiteness in past tense contexts were not significantly better for irregular than for regular verbs. This held true for both the control children and the children with SLI. No significant differences were observed either in the period prior to overregularization or after overregularization. A positive correlation was, however, found in both the SLI and the MLU groups between the most frequent past tense forms used by the children and those used by the eleven mothers of the MLU control children. The implications of these results for models of past tense acquisition such as the surface account, the extended optional infinitive account, and the single-mechanism account are discussed.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)321-349
    Number of pages28
    JournalLinguistics
    Volume41
    Issue number2
    Publication statusPublished - 2003

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