The use of definite and indefinite articles by children with specific language impairment

Abstract

Among the grammatical limitations seen in English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a prolonged period of using articles (e.g., a, the) inconsistently. Most studies documenting this difficulty have focused on article omission and have not made the distinction between definite and indefinite article contexts. In this study, there were 36 participants: 12 5-year-olds with SLI, 12 typically-developing children matched for age, and 12 younger, typically-developing children matched with participants in the SLI group according to mean length of utterance. All 36 children participated in a task requiring indefinite article use, and a task requiring use of the definite article, in which the referent of the noun had already been established in the discourse. The children with SLI showed less use of definite articles in particular, relative to both groups of typically-developing children. Substitutions as well as omissions were seen. The findings suggest that the article limitations of the children with SLI were attributable in part to an incomplete understanding of how definite articles are to be used.

Keywords:

• Specific language impairment (SLI)
• children
• expressive language
• definite article
• indefinite article

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by research grant R01 DC000458 to the second author and a pre-doctoral fellowship award F31 DC 008753 to the first author from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. We thank the children who participated in the studies, and their families for allowing them to do so. We would also like to thank Lyle Lloyd and David Snow, who provided insights and suggestions for this research and the members of the Child Language Laboratory at Purdue University, especially Patricia Deevy, Ashley Flad, Lisa Beehler, Jesse Grskovic, Andrea Miller, Emily Brown, Megan Garrity, and Lisa Wisman Weil.