ABSTRACT

This study addresses the question of whether gender agreement is impaired in SLI German. Article production and gender marking on articles were examined in three groups of German-speaking children: 10 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), 10 age-matched typically developing (TD) children, and 10 TD children who were on average two years younger. Gender marking on articles did not reveal any evidence of an agreement deficit in the SLI group. Nevertheless, the children of the SLI group had a selective deficit in assigning the correct gender to neuter nouns. Regarding article production, it was found that article omissions were more frequent in the SLI group than in the age-matched TD group. However, these omissions cannot be clearly attributed to a deficit in gender agreement. The data indicate that article omissions may also reflect an avoidance strategy due to a lack of gender information. These results provide evidence for the ability of SLI children to acquire and use rule-governed syntactic computations. This is incompatible with accounts of SLI that posit a broad syntactic deficit in these children.

摘要

这项研究解决了SLI德语中性别协议是否受到损害的问题。在三组说德语的儿童中检查了商品的生产和商品上的性别标记：10名有特殊语言障碍（SLI）的儿童，10名与年龄相匹配的典型发育中（TD）的儿童和10名平均年龄小于两岁的TD的儿童。文章上的性别标记未显示出SLI组中协议不足的任何证据。但是，SLI组的孩子在为中性名词分配正确的性别时有选择性的缺陷。关于物品的生产，发现与年龄匹配的TD组相比，SLI组的物品遗漏更为常见。但是，这些疏漏不能明确地归因于性别协议的不足。数据表明，由于缺乏性别信息，文章的遗漏也可能反映了一种避免策略。这些结果为SLI儿童获得和使用规则控制的句法计算的能力提供了证据。这与SLI的说明不符，这些说明在这些儿童中存在广泛的句法缺陷。