Specific language impairment; French; morphosyntactic cues; Sentence processing; dysphasie; traitement des phrases; morphosyntaxe
Abstract :
[en] The sentence comprehension strategies used by children with speci®c language
impairments (SLI) were examined within the framework of the Competition
Model (Bates and MacWhinney, 1989). The experiment was a replication of Kail
and Charvillat'experiment (1988) designed to investigate the use of different
morphosyntactic cues (i.e. word order, clitic pronoun, verbal agreement) in
sentence comprehension by children (4;6 ± 6;6) with normal language
development. They found that French speaking children used mainly
information on word order with a lesser reliance on the other cues (word
order4clitic pronoun4verbal agreement). In the present study, the same
experiment was replicated with 25 French speaking children with SLI. The
results suggested that children with SLI had speci®c di culties in processing
clitic pronouns, while verbal agreement could be processed (word order4verbal
agreement4clitic pronoun). This pattern seems to be a speci®c strategy and not
simply a delayed pro®le. In addition, our results were compatible with a
theoretical account in terms of limitation in processing capacities.
Disciplines :
Languages & linguistics Theoretical & cognitive psychology
