Specific Language Impairment

This study analyzes grammatical and pragmatic data of English and Dutch acquiring children with SLI, and compares them to the language of typically developing children in order to gain more insight in the organization of language, in particular, the dissociation and interaction between grammar and pragmatics. It is hypothesized that children with SLI are not impaired in the pragmatic component of language, but that they are in their grammar. Several language phenomena (such as the realization of subjects, articles, and object scrambling) are examined on both their pragmatic and their grammatical properties. The results show that the children with SLI perform well on the pragmatic properties, but less well on the grammatical properties, supporting the hypothesis. In contrast, (younger) typically developing children make errors with respect to both the pragmatic and the grammatical properties. Besides students, teachers and researchers of (impaired) language acquisition and linguistics, linguistically informed speech clinicians will also benefit from reading this book.

Autorentext

Jeannette Schaeffer is a linguist specializing in the development of typical and impaired child language. She earned her PhD degree from UCLA in 1997, and was a Postdoc at MIT until 1998. From 1998-2011 she worked as an Assistant and Associate Professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel. Her current work place is the University of Amsterdam.