What Is a Word? Recognizing Polymorphemic Lexical Items in DLI (original) (raw)

Verb reading in developmental language impairment

2003

This research addresses the issues of frequency and regularity in verb reading and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in DLI francophones. A reading task probes response latencies and response accuracy for DLI and control participants on frequent and infrequent inflected forms of verbs. DLI participants are slower at reading verbs even if their mean accuracy rates are higher than controls. Results also indicate that the type of suffix on the verb affects controls and DLI participants differently in their accuracy rates: DLI participants exhibit higher error rates on less frequent inflections, while controls do not. Finally, unusual patterns are found for DLI participants on regular versus irregular verbs: regular verbs are slower to be read by DLI participants. These results are compared to findings from a previous simple lexical decision study. They are interpreted as indicating that DLI word reading patterns are qualitatively different from those evidenced by controls..

Frequency effects on visual word access in developmental language impairment

2002

This paper addresses the issues of frequency and morphological regularity in word recognition and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in developmentally language-impaired (DLI) francophones. Two visual lexical decision experiments (one simple, one primed) probe response latencies and response accuracy in DLI participants on frequent and infrequent inflected forms of verbs. DLI participants are mainly sensitive to suffix frequency and show little or no priming effects from primes morphologically related to the target. Results also show that irregularly related primes do not facilitate recognition of the target by participants with DLI. These results are interpreted as indicating that words are not organized according to "morphological families" in the DLI mental lexicon, but rather according to a principle of frequency, and support the hypothesis that words in the DLI mental lexicon lack lexical features and morphological structure. Results indicate that the organization of the mental lexicon of individuals with DLI differs significantly from that of controls.

Elicitation of the passé composé in French preschoolers with and without specific language impairment

2008

This study examines inflectional abilities in French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) using a verb elicitation task. Eleven children with SLI and age-matched controls (37–52 months) participated in the experiment.We elicited the passé composé using eight regular and eight irregular high frequency verbs matched for age of acquisition. Children with SLI showed dissimilar productive verb inflection abilities to control children (even when comparing participants with similar verb vocabularies and mean length of utterance in words). Control children showed evidence of overregularization and sensitivity to morphological structure, whereas no such effects were observed in the SLI group. Error patterns observed in the SLI group demonstrate that, at this age, they cannot produce passé composé forms in elicitation tasks, even though some participants used them spontaneously. Either context by itself might therefore be insufficient to fully evaluate productive linguistic abilities in children with SLI.

Variable effects of morphology and frequency on inflection patterns in French preschoolers

2007

We studied the emergence of productive verb inflection in pre-school native speakers of Quebec French using a verb elicitation task. We verified whether verb conjugation group (regular vs. irregular morphology) and frequency affect ability to produce correctly inflected passé composé forms. Special attention was paid to regularization into regular (default) and sub-regular conjugations, and to irregularization patterns. Results indicate that French-speaking children are able to productively use inflectional rules at very young ages and are sensitive to verb frequency and morphological patterns, both default and sub-regular, as evidenced by differential production patterns for regular and irregular verbs

Insensitivity to verb conjugation patterns in French children with SLI

Specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized 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.