Quantifying the relative contributions of lexical and phonological factors to regular past tense accuracy

Abstract

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) frequently have difficulty producing the past tense. This study aimed to quantify the relative influence of telicity (i.e. the completedness of an event), verb frequency and stem final phonemes on the production of past tense by school-age children with SLI and their typically-developing (TD) peers.

Method: Archival elicited production data from children with SLI between the ages of 6–9 and TD peers aged 4–8 were re-analysed. Past tense accuracy was predicted using measures of telicity, verb frequency measures and properties of the final consonant of the verb stem.

Result: All children were highly accurate when verbs were telic, the inflected form was frequently heard in the past tense and the word ended in a sonorant/non-alveolar consonant. All children were less accurate when verbs were atelic, rarely heard in the past tense or ended in a word final obstruent or alveolar consonant. SLI status depressed overall accuracy rates, but did not influence how facilitative a given factor was.

Conclusion: Some factors that have been believed to be useful only when children are first discovering past tense, such as telicity, appear to be influential in later years as well.

Keywords::

• Past tense
• telicity
• lexical frequency
• target selection
• consonant cluster
• child language
• SLI

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an internal research grant from the University of Iowa. We would like to thank the children and families who participated in this project and the support of Augustana College (Allison Haskill) and the Scottish Rite Program (Elizabeth Merrifield) for assistance with subject recruitment. This paper benefitted from discussion within the Language Discussion Group at the University of Iowa. Susan Wagner Cook provided advice on statistical analysis. Jean Gordon read and commented on the paper and its presentation of material. Portions of the paper were presented at BUCLD held in Boston, MA in 2009.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Supplementary material available online

Supplementary Appendix A and B to be found online at http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/17549507.2015.1034174.