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

R. INGHAM
representations but also involve establishing some form of rule-governed
knowledge. The findings in the present paper show that children whose rulebased
language system is developing normally do not have a deficit in this
domain, whereas those whose rule system-forming ability is impaired (on a
production measure of past tense form) also have a deficit with argument
structure (on a production measure of verb-specific syntactic forms). This
alignment of an a-structure deficit with a past tense deficit may suggest that
grammatical SLI involves the representation or processing of structural
relations at the clause level, thus going beyond morphological featureblindness
(Gopnik & Crago 1991), extended optional infinitive (Rice, Wexler
& Cleave 1995) or impaired paradigm building (Leonard 1998), and
suggesting a structural relations account such as that of van der Lely &
Stollwerck (1997).
However, despite this slight widening of grammar acquisition to
include argument structure, my tentative conclusion is that these grammar
impairments are fundamentally dissociated from lexical acquisition, contra
the position taken by Bates & Goodman (1997) and others. It appears to occur
in some SLI children with no receptive lexical deficit, while in others
grammar acquisition seems robust enough to proceed despite a pronounced
receptive lexical deficit. The research presented here in preliminary form
indicates that models of acquisition which provide for a dissociation between
acquisition mechanisms will be more successful in accounting for these
results than models which provide a single mechanism driving both grammar
acquisition and lexical acquisition.
References
Bates, E. & J. Goodman (1997) On the inseparability of grammar and the lexicon.
Language and cognitive processes 12, 507-584.
Bates, E., I. Bretherton, & L. Snyder (1988) From first words to grammar: individual
differences and dissociable mechanisms. CUP.
Bishop, D. (1992) The underlying nature of specific language impairment. Journal of
Child Psychology and Psychiatry 28, 1-8.
Bishop, D. & Edmondson (1987) Language impaired 4 year-olds: distinguishing transient
from persistent impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 52, 156-173.
Clahsen , H., M. Rothweiler, A. Woest, & G. Marcus (1993) Regular and irregular
inflection in the acquisition of German noun plurals. Cognition 45 225-255.
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