The influence of the frequency of functional markers on repetitive imitation of syntactic constructions in children with specific language impairment, from their own language productions

Abstract

Several studies provide considerable insight into the role that frequency plays in language development. However, no study has investigated the direct relationship between frequency and grammatical acquisition in children with specific language impairment (SLI). In this study, we focus specifically on the influence of the frequency of functional words on the ability of children with SLI to produce grammatical constructions based on the children's own previous production but containing previously unused functional words. To test our hypothesis, the children were administered an imitative repetition task, tailored to their current level of language development. Results showed that children with SLI performed more poorly than language-matched children with typical language development. The difference between the two groups was more marked when the previously unused functional words were infrequent rather than frequent. Consequently, it would seem that the token frequency of functional words influences grammatical acquisition in children with SLI. The results and their implications for linguistic theories are discussed.

Keywords:

• Linguistics
• language acquisition
• specific language impairment
• functional word frequency
• grammatical construction generalization

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS (Belgium). We thank all the children who participated in the study and their parents for their collaboration. We are grateful to Mélissa Moulin and Marie Vanden Broucke for their assistance in data collection.

Declaration of Interest: The authors report no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 Intention-reading is a category of general cognitive processes (including joint attention, understanding communicative intentions and cultural learning) by which children attempt to understand the communicative significance of an utterance (Tomasello, 2003).

2 Freqfilm is defined as frequency of the word in a corpus of subtitles (per million occurrences).