Past tense –ed omissions by children with specific language impairment: The role of sonority and phonotactics

Abstract

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) frequently omit past tense –ed. Omission rates are subject to phonological context. Two phonological characteristics were manipulated; the sonority profile of the stem-final phoneme plus affix, and the phonotactic probability of the word-final phonemes (/i:pt/ in beeped). Seventeen children with SLI (mean age 6;7) and 21 language-matched children (mean age 4;8) repeated sentences containing regularly inflected verbs according to a 2 (sonority) by 2 (phonotactic legality) design. Affix omissions were analysed. There was a significant effect of sonority only, characterised by a difficulty with level-sonority clusters, and no interaction. Syllabic affixes, e.g. head-ed, were produced relatively accurately. It is argued that –ed omissions in SLI may reflect a low-level speech or articulation difficulty which surfaces in uniquely challenging clusters. This is not an alternative to morphosyntactic accounts; rather past tense omissions are best explained according to complexity in multiple domains; syntactic, morpho-syntactic and phonological.

• Morphology
• phonotactics
• sonority
• specific language impairments

Acknowledgments

A massive thank you to all the children, teachers and speech and language therapists, who participated in, or supported the work. Thanks also to Christos Pliatsikas and Kerry Davis for their inter-rating work, and colleagues at the universities of Reading and Newcastle, in particular Ghada Khattab, for their invaluable support and feedback. Thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Funding

This study was financially supported by the British Academy (Project Award Number PDF/2007/460).

Declaration of interest

The author reports no declarations of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the article.