Morphosyntax and Phonological Awareness in Children with Speech Sound Disorders

The goals of the current study were to examine concurrent and longitudinal relationships of expressive morphosyntax and phonological awareness in a group of children with speech sound disorders. Tests of phonological awareness were administered to 38 children at the end of their prekindergarten and kindergarten years. Speech samples were elicited and analyzed to obtain a set of expressive morphosyntax variables. Finite verb morphology and inflectional suffix use by prekindergarten children were found to predict significant unique variance in change in phonological awareness a year later. These results are consistent with previous research showing finite verb morphology to be a sensitive indicator of language impairment in English.