Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL DEFICITS IN SLI
agent was shown bouncing a ball, in the other a ball was shown bouncing
with no agent in the picture. The child’s use of argument structure with that
scene was then analysed for how semantic role was linked to grammatical
function. This is illustrated below:
Argument structure alternations
(SCENE WITHOUT AGENT)
(SCENE WITH AGENT)
Child response
(1) ‘The ball was bouncing’ (2) ‘The boy was bouncing the ball’
SUBJECT SUBJECT OBJECT
THEME AGENT THEME
(3) The girl rubbed polish on the shoe (4)The girl rubbed the shoe with polish
OBJECT
OBJECT
THEME
LOCATION
Each group of children with SLI was then compared with the matched LN
group on the particular measures. For past tense this was the frequency with
which the child supplied the past tense of regular verbs in the narrative task.
For argument structure this was the frequency with which each child used
both forms of an alternation, e.g. (1) as well as (2).
4. Results and discussion
As shown in Figure 1, the past Tense scores of children with SLI (+LD) show
great variation, their BPVS matches far less.
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