Canonical and Epenthetic Plural Marking in Spanish-Speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment

Autor/inn/en	Grinstead, John; Cantu-Sanchez, Myriam; Flores-Avalos, Blanca
Titel	Canonical and Epenthetic Plural Marking in Spanish-Speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment
Quelle	In: Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 15 (2008) 4, S.329-349 (21 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1048-9223
Schlagwörter	Control Groups; Speech Communication; Nouns; Morphemes; Language Impairments; Foreign Countries; Spanish Speaking; Grammar; Child Language; Language Proficiency; Task Analysis; Linguistic Theory; Error Analysis (Language); Mexico + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Morphem; Speech disorder; Speech disorders; Speech disabilities; Speech disability; Speech handicap; Speech handicaps; Speech impairment; Speech impairments; Language handicaps; Sprachbehinderung; Ausland; Grammatik; 'Children''s language'; Kindersprache; Language skill; Language skills; Sprachkompetenz; Aufgabenanalyse; Linguistische Theorie; Error analysis; Language; Fehleranalyse; Mexiko
Abstract	In this study, we investigate whether specific language impairment (SLI) manifests itself grammatically in the same way in Spanish and English with respect to nominal plural marking. English-speaking children with SLI are very proficient at marking plural on nouns. Spanish has two main nominal plural allomorphs: /s/ and /es/. The /es/ allomorph has received multiple theoretical treatments, including one (e.g., Harris (1991)) which argues that in singular-plural pairs such as "flor-flores," the /e/ is epenthetic, while other accounts (e.g., Colina (2003)) argue that synchronically there is an underlying /e/ in the singular form (e.g., "flore") which gets deleted by apocope. Child Spanish speakers with SLI in the United States have shown mixed results in their abilities to learn plural marking. They have shown low proficiency on an elicited production task, but have shown high proficiency in spontaneous production data. We show, using a new elicited production task in Mexico with a group of children diagnosed with SLI and two control groups, that performance is close to the high levels previously shown in spontaneous production studies. Further, we show that all children's performance with the epenthetic allomorph /es/ is worse than their performance with the canonical allomorph /s/. Our results suggest that plural marking is not an axis of cross-linguistic variation between Spanish and English among children with SLI. On the basis of the absence of child errors of the "flore" type and presence of errors of the "flors" type, our data appear to support the epenthesis account of Harris (1991). (Contains 2 figures, 5 footnotes and 8 tables.) (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10