Lack of generalization as explicative factor of morphosyntactic difficulties in children with SLI: a longitudinal study

Background. Constructivist approach (Goldberg, 2006; Tomasello, 2003) postulates that children build their linguistic system from their own linguistic experience. To be productive with their language, children have to generalize construction schemas to never heard items. Because children with SLI show limited morphosyntactic creativity and variability, we hypothesized that they would have difficulties to generalize their construction schemas, which would hinder their access to the most abstract level of the linguistic competence. Our aim was to test whether children with SLI had more difficulties than children with TLD to generalize a schema to new items.
Methods. Seven children with SLI matched with 6 children TLD based on linguistic age were recorded for this study. Two steps were repeated at three different moments spread out three years. The first step consisted in a recording of a parent/child interaction at their house. All interactions were transcribed and analyzed. The second step consisted in the creation of two tasks from each child’s own productions: an utterance repetition task and a priming task. Tasks were individualized. Items were created from schemas considered as “acquired” and schemas considered as “non-acquired”.
Results. Priming task. Current statistical analyses revealed a significant “Group” effect, a significant “Time” effect and a no significant “Group” by “Time” effect. Analyses revealed a significant “Structure” effect and a significant “Group” by “Structure” effect. Difference between the two groups was more marked for items with “non-acquired” schemas. Repetition task. The same results were obtained; except for “Time” variable (no significant effect).
Discussion. The two groups had more difficulties to generalize non-acquired schemas to new items, but children with SLI seemed to have more difficulties, which could mean that their productivity with new schemas was more hindered. Consequently, results are compatible with our hypothesis suggesting that children with SLI have more difficulties for generalizing a schema to new items.