Grammatical case-marking in Japanese children with SLI

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not Japanese children with specific language impairment (henceforth; SLI) would in fact experience difficulty with grammatical case-marking. The participants were 10 Japanese children with SLI, aged 7;7 to 11;4, and 25 Japanese children with typical language development (henceforth; TLD), aged 8;11 to 9;11. In this study, a sentence completion task was used, which involved both active and passive sentences with canonical and scrambled word order. The children with SLI were significantly less accurate than those with TLD with the use of grammatical case-markers. Moreover, the majority of the errors that the children with SLI made with case-marking consisted of canonical case-marking patterns. These results suggest that Japanese children with SLI do in fact appear to experience difficulty with grammatical case-marking and furthermore that they seem to rely on canonical case-marking patterns to compensate for their deficits.

KEYWORDS:

• Compensatory strategies
• grammatical case-marking
• Japanese
• specific language impairment

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the 35 children and to their parents and to the teachers of various elementary schools in Tokyo, Japan.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no declaration of interest. They alone are responsible for the contents and the writing of the article.

Funding

This work was partially supported by a JSPS Grants-in Aid for JSPS Fellows #26-8178 to the first author and for Scientific Research (C) #26380873 to the second author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by a JSPS Grants-in Aid for JSPS Fellows #26-8178 to the first author and for Scientific Research (C) #26380873 to the second author.