Background & Objectives
In the present study, grammaticality judgment skills of Korean- speaking children with specific language impairment(SLI) were investigated, focusing on their detection of erroneous case-markers.
Methods
Fifteen children with SLI between the ages 6.2 and 7.8 years, 15 normal children with matched chronological age(CA), and 15 normal children with matched language age(LA) participated in the study. They were asked to judge the grammatical correctness of 48 short sentences, half of which contained incorrect case-markers and the other half were grammatically correct. In addition to the accuracy of responses, reaction times(RTs) of the participants’ decisions were measured. Four types of case-markers, including nominatives “-i/ga,” accusatives “-ul/lul,” a locative “-e,” and an instrumental “-ro” were systematically changed to generate the grammatically incorrect sentences.
Results
In terms of accuracy, the SLI children were significantly less accurate than the CA children in detecting the errors of “-i/ga, -e, -ro,” and less than the LA children in detecting the errors of “-ro.” In terms of RT measure, the SLI children were slower than the CA children in detecting the errors of all four case-markers and slower than the LA children in detecting the errors of “-i/ga, -e, -ro.” No significant differences were noted between the two normal groups both in accuracy and in RT measures.
Discussion & Conclusion
The SLI children showed significant difficulties in grammaticality judgments compared not only to the CA matched children but also to the LA-matched younger children. Such group differences were more extensive in the RT data than in accuracy data. The implications of the results were discussed on the basis of limited processing capacity hypothesis for SLI children’s language deficits. |
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