Past tense –ed omissions by children with specific language impairment: The role of sonority and phonotactics. (June 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Riches, Nick
• Is Part Of: Clinical linguistics & phonetics. Volume 29:Number 6(2015:Jun.)
• Page Start: 482
• Page End: 497
• Publication Date: 2015-06
• Subjects: Language disorders -- Periodicals; Applied linguistics -- Periodicals; Phonetics -- Periodicals; 616.855
• DOI: 10.3109/02699206.2015.1027832
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0269-9206

Abstract

<abstract> <title>Abstract</title> <p>Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) frequently omit past tense –ed. Omission rates are subject to phonological context. Two phonological characteristics were manipulated; the sonority profile of the stem-final phoneme plus affix, and the phonotactic probability of the word-final phonemes (/i:pt/ in <italic>beeped</italic>). Seventeen children with SLI (mean age 6;7) and 21 language-matched children (mean age 4;8) repeated sentences containing regularly inflected verbs according to a 2 (sonority) by 2 (phonotactic legality) design. Affix omissions were analysed. There was a significant effect of sonority only, characterised by a difficulty with level-sonority clusters, and no interaction. Syllabic affixes, e.g. <italic>head-ed</italic>, were produced relatively accurately. It is argued that –ed omissions in SLI may reflect a low-level speech or articulation difficulty which surfaces in uniquely challenging clusters. This is not an alternative to morphosyntactic accounts; rather past tense omissions are best explained according to complexity in multiple domains; syntactic, morpho-syntactic and phonological.</p> </abstract>