Morphological representation in specific language impairment: Evidence from Greek word formation

Specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized by difficulties in inflectional morphology. Here we investigate SLI morphological competence to build and represent complex word structure. We examine the findings of two tasks where SLI subjects' performance is compared to that of controls: (a) plural formation and (b) compound formation. Subjects were presented with real and novel singular nouns in Greek and required to form plurals and compounds in each respective task. Both plural formation and compound formation are productive processes readily observed in non-impaired youngsters, with typical non-impaired errors being mostly constrained over-generalizations. The SLI children whose performance we consider here are below par in their morphological competence and the findings suggest that they do not build lexical representations that represent sublexical features or complex word-internal structure.