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Children with Specific Language Impairment in Finnish: the use of tense and agreement inflections*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2011

SARI KUNNARI ,
TUULA SAVINAINEN-MAKKONEN ,
LAURENCE B. LEONARD ,
LEENA MÄKINEN ,
ANNA-KAISA TOLONEN ,
MIRJA LUOTONEN  and
EEVA LEINONEN
SARI KUNNARI*
Affiliation:
University of Oulu, Finland
TUULA SAVINAINEN-MAKKONEN
Affiliation:
University of Oulu, Finland
LAURENCE B. LEONARD
Affiliation:
Purdue University, USA
LEENA MÄKINEN
Affiliation:
University of Oulu, Finland
ANNA-KAISA TOLONEN
Affiliation:
University of Oulu, Finland
MIRJA LUOTONEN
Affiliation:
Oulu University Hospital, Finland
EEVA LEINONEN
Affiliation:
King's College, UK
*
Address for correspondence: Sari Kunnari, Faculty of Humanities, Logopedics, PO Box 1000, FI-90014University of Oulu, Finland. e-mail: sari.kunnari@oulu.fi
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Abstract

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) vary widely in their ability to use tense/agreement inflections depending on the type of language being acquired, a fact that current accounts of SLI have tried to explain. Finnish provides an important test case for these accounts because: (1) verbs in the first and second person permit null subjects whereas verbs in the third person do not; and (2) tense and agreement inflections are agglutinating and thus one type of inflection can appear without the other. Probes were used to compare the verb inflection use of Finnish-speaking children with SLI, and both age-matched and younger typically developing children. The children with SLI were less accurate, and the pattern of their errors did not match predictions based on current accounts of SLI. It appears that children with SLI have difficulty learning complex verb inflection paradigms apart from any problem specific to tense and agreement.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 5 , November 2011 , pp. 999 - 1027
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[*]

The research reported here was supported by research grant R01 DC00458 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health and by the Academy of Finland. We wish to thank the families for participating in the project and Patricia Deevy for her helpful comments on the manuscript.

References

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