Resultative VPs and Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

It has been proposed that grammatical specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized as a deficit affecting only feature-related aspects of grammar. The research reported here indicates a wider impairment involving aspects of grammar not determined by feature checking, in particular to the structure of the verb phrase (VP) with resultative secondary predication. The results of two video elicitation tasks showed children with SLI to have a significant deficit on such VP constructions compared with chronological age matches and younger vocabulary matches. These findings are accounted for by the deficit in dependency relations proposed by van der Lely (1996) to the effect that nonbinary syntactic dependencies are vulnerable in grammatical SLI. Additionally, it is shown that research using mean length of utterance matching of children with SLI may obscure syntactic problems revealed by matching with younger children on another language trait.