Grammaticality judgment in French-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment

Grammaticality judgement abilities were examined among French-speaking children with SLI. Rice,
Wexler, and Redmond (1999) showed that children’s grammatical judgements paralleled their
production: they rejected morphosyntactic errors they were unlikely to commit (e.g., agreement
errors), whereas they accepted morphosyntactic errors that they were likely to produce (e.g., violation
of tense marking). According to the authors, their findings supported the extended optional infinitive
(EOI) account of a morphosyntactic limitation in SLI children based on underlying grammatical
representations. They did not support accounts of input processing deficits or production constraints.
However, important methodological limitations have challenged their results. In our study, SLI
children and their control counterparts were asked to detect different grammatical violations: (1)
agreement errors; (2) violations of tense marking; or (3) a control measure: order violations. Contrary
to the control children, SLI children appeared to be sensitive to the kind of modification to be
detected. They detected significantly fewer verbal morphology-related violations (1 and 2) than order
violations (3). These findings, which weaken Rice et al.’s results, are more compatible with other
interpretations (e.g., phonological or cognitive) of grammatical disorders in SLI than with an EOI
account.