Four areas of morphosyntax in Arabic-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) were investigated: tense, subject-verb agreement, determiners, and prepositions. Spontaneous production data were analyzed for accuracy and error types in using these morphemes. Two groups of typically-developing Arabic-speaking children served as Mean Length Utterance (MLU)-matched and chronological age-matched controls. The results indicate that Arabic-speaking children with SLI were significantly different from the two control groups of children on percentage correct use of tense and subject-verb agreement. Furthermore, when an error in verbal inflection occurred, the substitute form was usually an underspecified/default form, namely the imperative. / The findings of the study are discussed in light of existing theoretical accounts of SLI. Three positions are examined: (a) tense marking constitutes the locus of SLI grammatical difficulties (Extended Optional Infinitive hypothesis, Rice & Wexler, 1996); (b) morphosyntactic problems stem from deficits in agreement relations (Grammatical Agreement Deficit account, Clahsen, 1989; Clahsen, Bartke, & Gollner, 1997); and (c) trouble with inflectional morphology is less pronounced in children with SLI acquiring richly inflected languages (Sparse Morphology account, Leonard, Bortolini, Caselli, McGregor, & Sabbadim, 1992). Special characteristics of Arabic such as its intricate morphological system and null subject properties make it particularly valuable in determining universal versus language-specific aspects of SLI. Clinical implications for SLI in Arabic and directions for future research are also explored.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.82810 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Abdalla, Fauzia Ahmed |
| Contributors | Crago, Martha (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 | Doctor of Philosophy (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: 001974436, proquestno: AAINQ88403, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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