Probing morphological, syntactic and pragmatic knowledge through answers to wh-questions in children with SLI

Abstract

Purpose: This study investigated aspects of morphology, syntax and pragmatics in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). These areas of language were investigated by evaluating children’s answers to wh-questions.

Method: Elicited production methodology was used to evoke answers to three types of wh-questions. There were 54 participants: 18 children with SLI (mean age = 5;3); 18 language-matched children matched on mean length of utterance (mean age = 3;4) and 18 age-matched children (mean age = 5;3).

Result: The SLI group demonstrated comprehension of the wh-questions, as revealed by their answers using the appropriate syntactic category. Children with SLI also demonstrated knowledge of pragmatics by using a pronoun to refer to a discourse referent that was previously introduced as a full noun phrase. Unlike the control children, children with SLI did not show sensitivity to one measure of the Maxim of Quantity; they gave more full sentence answers to wh-questions in contexts when most speakers would give a shorter, fragment answer. The tense-related morphology was also frequently omitted from children’s answers.

Conclusion: The experiment revealed that children with SLI did well on syntactic and pragmatic measures. The greatest challenge was in providing tense-related morphemes in their answers to questions.

Keywords:

• Grammatical knowledge
• SLI
• wh-questions

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CE110001021, www.ccd.edu.au). Kelly Rombough was supported by a PhD fellowship funded by the CCD. We thank Stephen Crain, Peng Zhou and the members of the Language Acquisition Group at Macquarie University for their feedback and suggestions. We would also like to thank Elena D'Onofrio, for her assistance with data collection and transcription. Most importantly, thank you to all the children who participated in the study.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no declarations of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this paper.