LINGUIST List 17.2923
Fri Oct 06 2006
Diss: Psycholinguistics: Mastropavlou: 'The Role of Phonological Sa...'
Editor for this issue: Hannah Morales
<hannahlinguistlist.org>
Directory
1. Maria
Mastropavlou,
The Role of Phonological Salience and Feature Interpretability in the Grammar of Typically Developing and Language Impaired Children
Message 1: The Role of Phonological Salience and Feature Interpretability in the Grammar of Typically Developing and Language Impaired Children
Date: 06-Oct-2006
From: Maria Mastropavlou <mmastropenl.auth.gr>
Subject: The Role of Phonological Salience and Feature Interpretability in the Grammar of Typically Developing and Language Impaired Children
Institution: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Program: School of English, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2006
Author: Maria Mastropavlou
Dissertation Title: The Role of Phonological Salience and Feature Interpretability in the Grammar of Typically Developing and Language Impaired Children
Linguistic Field(s):
Psycholinguistics
Dissertation Director:
Ianthi Maria Tsimpli
Anna Roussou
Arhonto Terzi
Dissertation Abstract:
The aim of this thesis is to address two fundamental questions related tothe nature of specific language impairment: first, is the locus of theproblem in the representation of formal features and what is it thatrenders them inaccessible to SLI children? And second, does languagedevelopment in SLI deviate from typical language acquisition in such a waythat we can talk about language impairment rather than language delay?
Three groups of children were recruited: an experimental group of tenchildren with specific language impairment, aged between 4;2 and 5;9, andtwo control groups selected based on chronological age (age-matched) andlanguage development (language-matched). The three groups were administereda number of speech elicitation tests, aiming at the investigation of theformal features of tense in the verbal domain, gender, case and number inthe nominal domain. Specifically, the effect of feature interpretability -both LF and PF - on the children's performance was explored, whileperformance differences between the SLI and the two control groups wereanalysed with respect to the delay/deviance question. The results indicatedthat LF uninterpretable features like tense and case cause greaterdifficulties to SLI children than number, an LF interpretable feature.Gender, a lexical/intrinsic feature, seems to be highly accessible to thesechildren, who did not exhibit any notable difficulties. Furthermore, PFinterpretability presented strong effects in the SLI children's performancein tense marking, a pattern that was not observed in either of the twocontrol groups' results.
These results suggest that LF interpretability determines the extent towhich formal features are accessible to SLI grammars, while PFinterpretability constitutes a means of compensation for an underlyingmorphological deficit. Detailed analyses of the children's error patternsindicated that SLI children have reduced skills of acquiring morphologicalfeatures and depend on information available on a semantic, lexical orphonological level to a greater extent than unaffected children do.Finally, it is claimed that specific language impairment impedes on theacquisition of the morphological expression of formal features rather thantheir abstract representation, while the different error patterns exhibitedby the language-impaired group compared to the two control groups indicatedeviant rather than delayed development.
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