Insensitivity to verb conjugation patterns in French children with SLI

ABSTRACT

Specific language impairment (SLI) is characterised by persistent difficulties that affect language abilities in otherwise normally developing children (Leonard, 2014). It remains challenging to identify young children affected by SLI in French. We tested oral production of the passé composé tense in 19 children in kindergarten and first grade with SLI aged from 5;6 to 7;4 years. All children were schooled in a French environment, but with different linguistic backgrounds. We used an Android application, Jeu de verbes (Marquis et al., 2012), with six verbs in each of four past participle categories (ending in -é, -i, -u, and other irregulars). We compared their results and error types to those of control children (from Marquis, 2012–2014) matched for gender, age, languages spoken at home, and parental education. Results show that children with SLI do not master the passé composé in the same way as typical French children do, at later ages than previously shown in the literature. This task shows potential for oral language screening in French-speaking children in kindergarten and first grade, independently of language background.

KEYWORDS:

• Conjugation groups
• French
• morphology
• specific language impairment
• verbs

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the children and their parents, the schools, the teachers, and the speech-language pathologists who agreed to participate in the study. We thank two anonymous editors for their thoughtful comments. Special thanks go to Marielle Jullien for her help with testing, Tracy Kawass for data coding, and Margaret McKyes for revision.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare, and the funding agencies had no say in this research.

Funding

This study was funded by post-doctoral funding from the FQRSC (Marquis, 2012–2014), SSHRC Institutional funding from the University of Montreal (Royle, 2014–2015), and a summer bursary scholarship from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Montreal (COPSE) (St-Denis, 2015).

Notes

¹ Only two irregular verbs belong to this group: aller ‘to go’ and s’en aller ‘to leave’. Aller is also used as an auxiliary in the future periphrastic form, for example, il va ouvrir ‘he will open’.

² Stress is noncontrastive in French in that it serves only to indicate syntactically conditioned phrase boundaries. Stress is realized on the final full (non-schwa) vowel of the phrase. When words are produced in isolation, stress falls on the final full vowel of the word (Yvan Rose, personal communication).

³ Two pairs of children with SLI were twins, see Appendix A.

⁴ His language scores for the Échelle de Vocabulaire en Images Peabody (EVIP) (Dunn, Thériault-Whalen, & Dunn, 1993) and the French version of the Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (Groupe Cooperatif en Orthophonie – Région Laval, 1995) results were average and his language delay was possibly due to significant prematurity.

⁵ Note that, we established four verb inflection patterns across three verb conjugation groups. We therefore use the term “verb category” or “type” rather than “conjugation group” in our analyses.

⁶ Three other school commissions on the island of Montreal: the Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys (CSMB), the Commission scolaire Pointe-de-l’Île (CSPI), and the Commission scolaire Marie-Victorin (CSMV), found similar results. The CSMB notes that 41% of its students speak a language other than French at home (2013). The CSPI (2013) reports that 31.4% of students are from immigrant families, without specifying which language is spoken at home. The CSMV (2013) states that 38.2% of its students are immigrants, and that 25.9% of elementary school students are allophones (speaking languages other than French).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by post-doctoral funding from the FQRSC (Marquis, 2012–2014), SSHRC Institutional funding from the University of Montreal (Royle, 2014–2015), and a summer bursary scholarship from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Montreal (COPSE) (St-Denis, 2015).