Prosodic constraints on inflected words: An area of difficulty for German-speaking children with specific language impairment?

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that morphosyntactic difficulties may result from prosodic problems. We therefore address the interface between inflectional morphology and prosody in typically developing children (TD) and children with SLI by testing whether these groups are sensitive to prosodic constraints that guide plural formation in German. A plural elicitation task was designed consisting of 60 words and 20 pseudowords. The performance of 14 German-speaking children with SLI (mean age 7.5) was compared to age-matched controls and to younger children matched for productive vocabulary. TD children performed significantly better than children with SLI. Error analyses revealed that children with SLI produced more forms that did not meet the optimal shape of a noun plural. Beyond the fact that children with SLI have deficits in plural marking, the findings suggest that they also show reduced sensitivity to prosodic requirements. In other words, the prosodic structure of inflected words seems to be vulnerable in children with SLI.

• Inflection
• lexical stress
• plural
• prosody
• specific language impairment

Acknowledgements

We thank Frank Domahs, Wiebke Hahn, Nina Niggemann, Karin Lohmann and Katrin Riederer for their help in the construction of the material, data collection and analysis and Gea de Jong for her helpful comments on language and style.

Code of ethics

The study was approved by the Hessian Ministry of Education and was in accordance with the ethical standards of the Word Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki).

Notes

*Note that, according to Wiese (2009), –e is not considered as an inflectional suffix, but as an epenthetic vowel added to fulfil the prosodic constraint for noun plurals.

*Note that in the studies of Oetting and Rice as well as Kauschke and colleagues, the younger control groups were matched for MLU. In this study, however, children were matched for vocabulary competence. This matching procedure was chosen, because vocabulary skills seem to be more strongly related to the task (isolated production of inflected words) than utterance length.

*The only exception in this condition is the word “Kranich”, crane, that ends with an unstressed, but not reduced syllable.