Morpho-Syntactic Development and Verb Argument Structure in Narratives of Dutch School-Age Children with SLI

Abstract

Morpho-syntactic skills and verb argument structure were investigated longitudinally in narratives of 16 Dutch children with SLI at ages 6, 7 and 8. On some measures, like MLU and sentence complexity, no significant differences were found between the different ages. On other measures, like proportions of agreement errors and complex sentences a ceiling effect was found at age 7. With respect to verb argument structure, subject and object omissions in obligatory contexts were investigated. No significant differences between ages were found for subject omissions, but object omissions decreased significantly between ages 7 and 8. Possibly due to poor working memory skills, the children violate rules for reference and allowed subject-drop. Special attention was given to the overuse of auxiliary gaan (to go) combined with infinitives and overuse of lexical gaan (to go) as general all purpose (GAP) verb. Proportions of gaan+infinitive remained large at all ages. Explanations may be found either in very slow verb paradigm learning or in word finding difficulties. The insertion of auxiliary gaan offers the children extra time to access the lexical verb. The overuse of gaan+infinitive might also be regarded as ‘frozen forms’ used by the children to cope with problems in inflection and movement of lexical verbs. This interpretation lends support to the procedural deficit hypothesis of Ullman & Pierpont (2005) who claim that children with SLI learn ‘rules’ in declarative memory (e.g. for past tense, use ging-en +infinitive). Proportions of lexical gaan decreased from 6 to 7 years and increased again from 7 to 8 years. It was suggested that a certain (critical) mass of the verb lexicon triggers word finding difficulties.