The present study is an investigation of on-line and off-line processing of verb tense in individuals with developmental language impairment. Three groups of subjects performed two experiments, (1) a lexical decision task (on-line) and, (2) a grammaticality judgement task (off-line). Grammaticality was controlled by the manipulation of tense for regular and irregular verbs. Participants were six members of a large British familial aggregation diagnosed with developmental language impairment, six of their unaffected relatives, and seven unaffected Canadian individuals. The results of the lexical decision task indicate that the reaction times of the affected group were slower than the Canadian control group. Unlike the control groups, the affected group was influenced by regular and irregular verb type distinctions. Reaction times across grammatical and ungrammatical conditions did not differ among the three groups. The groups differed significantly in the off-line task; accuracy of the affected subjects was poor, while the control subjects were highly accurate. The implications of these findings for linguistic theories of SLI such as the missing rules hypothesis (Gopnik, in press) are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.22771 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Mayo, Lori |
| Contributors | Crago, Martha B. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (School of Communication Sciences and Disorders.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001453680, proquestno: MM05595, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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