The use of props in a syntactic awareness task

Measuring Metasyntactic Abilities: On a Classification of Metasyntactic Tasks

Researchers working on metasyntactic abilities (i.e., the metalinguistic ability associated with syntax) face the problem of defining and measuring them. Metasyntactic abilities is a multifaceted concept, which encompasses various types of behaviours, from being able to intentionally manipulate syntactic structures to being able to state syntactic rules, and the way in which it is defined and measured varies greatly from one study to another. The present paper proposes a theoretically informed classification of syntax related tasks. The first part presents previous research defining and distinguishing various types of syntactic and metasyntactic abilities and their interrelations. In the second part, commonly used tasks are described and analyzed in terms of the framework presented, with the aim of better pinpointing the type of ability measured by each task. Ultimately, with this analysis of commonly used tasks, we hope to offer criteria for discriminating between the various measures of metasyntactic abilities.

Evaluating the morphological competence of children with severe speech and physical impairments

Reports present mixed findings on the extent to which the development of receptive language skills in children with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI) is compromised by their difficulty with speaking (V. W. Berninger & B. M. Gans, 1986; D. V. M. Bishop, B. Byers Brown, & J. Robson, 1990; O. Udwin & W. Yule, 1990). In this study, grammaticality judgments were used to measure the sensitivity of 4 school-age children with SSPI to different morphological errors. These errors included violations of agreement between the subject and auxiliary verbs (e.g., she are falling), the marking of aspect (e.g., she is play the horn), and the marking of past tense on regular and irregular verbs (e.g., he jump, he fall, he falled). Performance of the participants with SSPI was compared to groups of typically developing children and adults. Results indicated that children in the SSPI and control groups made similar judgments. All groups showed high levels of sensitivity to agreement violations, aspect-marking errors, and tense-marking errors involving irregular verbs. Participants with SSPI had greater difficulty detecting tense-marking errors involving regular verbs. Implications for improving clinical assessments within this population are discussed.

Detection of irregular verb violations by children with and without SLI

Fifty-seven children (ages in years;months: 5;7-8;8) with and without Specific Language Impairment (SLI) participated in judgment and elicitation tasks designed to evaluate their understanding of restrictions associated with irregular verb forms. The performance of the SLI group was similar to the performances of the control groups in that all children demonstrated high levels of sensitivity to violations involving verb-agreement errors (e.g., he am falling). The production and acceptance rates of past tense overregularizations (e.g., he falled) by the SLI and language-match groups were similar, and both were higher than the age-match group. Differences between affected and unaffected children were observed in their productions and relative levels of sensitivity to infinitive errors in finite positions (e.g., he fall off). As expected, children in the SLI group were more likely to produce and accept infinitive forms in finite positions. Children in the SLI group also accepted more finite form errors in VP complement positions (e.g., he made him fell) than the control groups, although the latter occurred rarely in children's productions. Implications for understanding morphophonological and morphosyntactic development in children with SLI are discussed.