Characterising developmental language impairment in Serbian-speaking children: A preliminary investigation

Abstract

The aim of the article is to provide preliminary data on the use of auxiliaries and clitics in Serbian-speaking children with developmental language impairment. Two groups of children (a group of 30 children with developmental language impairment and a group of 30 typically developing children) aged between 48 and 83 months and matched on IQ took part in the study. They were asked to tell a story from a series of four pictures. The results showed that the children with language impairment omitted significantly more auxiliary verbs and clitics than the controls. In addition, the rate of omission of auxiliaries and clitics did not decrease with increasing chronological age. We conclude that, as in other languages, auxiliary verbs and clitics are particularly difficult for Serbian-speaking children with language impairment.

• developmental language impairment
• children
• morphology
• auxiliaries
• Serbian

Notes

1. The long forms of the verb BE can be used for emphasis.

2. After the reflexive clitic ‘se’, especially in informal spoken registers, the form of the auxiliary BE is often omitted.

3. The stories produced by some of the children contained one or two clauses only and this is a methodological issue. We are aware that if the children were given the opportunity to produce more spontaneous speech, perhaps there would have emerged a more obvious difference between the two groups with regard to sentence length. However, given that some of the differences emerged even with these limited language samples, is an interesting finding and worth reporting.

4. Close inspection of the data showed that the children used the clitic version of ‘se’ and not its reflexive counterpart in all cases.

5. *Significance for ungrammatical sentence.