Learning an invented inflectional morpheme in Spanish by children with typical language skills and with specific language impairment (SLI)

Cross-linguistic research on SLI has suggested that how the disorder is manifested depends on the ambient language. For example, research on Italian indicates that SLI children do not present difficulties with verb inflection, when compared with MLU-matched peers. This pattern contrasts with what has been reported for English-speaking children. The present investigation sought to examine SLI children's use of inflectional morphology through a language teaching task similar to that used by Connell (1987) and Connell and Stone (1992). To address cross-linguistic differences, children were speakers of a language similar to Italian in its verb agreement paradigm. Sixteen Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking with SLI and 16 age-matched controls were taught a subject-verb agreement suffix that established the subject's gender. Half the children in each group were taught the new form via imitation. The rest of the participants were trained via a modeling procedure. Both comprehension and production of the target form were assessed. Results indicated significant differences across the SLI and typical groups for both comprehension and production of the inflectional morpheme, regardless of instructional strategy. These findings contradict what has been observed in previous studies on teaching an invented rule to children with SL;I. They also suggest that inflectional morphology may be problematic even for children who are learning a morphologically rich language. The explanatory power of the process account and the linguistic account of SLI are explored as these pertain to the present findings, and suggestions for further research are discussed.