Developmental Language Impairment (DLI) is a language disorder characterized by difficulties in both language production and comprehension most readily observable on the morphological level. Previous research suggests that DLI subjects are atypical regarding word decomposition and word formation. / Given these observations, two questions arise: What is the extent of DLI insensitivity to word-internal structure and to morpheme features? and Is this insensitivity equally evident in inflectional, derivational and compounding processes? Three experiments address these questions: plural formation, nominal compounding and diminutive formation and comprehension. / These word formation processes are very productive Greek and are observed from (2;0) onwards in non-impaired children cross-linguistically. Nominal roots (bound) are mapped to other bound morphemes: inflectional affixes for plural formation, derivational affixes and inflectional affixes for diminutive formation, and lexical morphemes and inflectional affixes for compound formation. / In this thesis, the performance of Greek DLI subjects was compared to that of non-impaired controls using elicited production and comprehension tasks that probed real and novel word formation. Results show that DLI children are not sensitive to morphological features and have difficulty knowing where root boundaries are. Given the atypical performance of DLI children, the initial hypothesis on the building of an atypical competence appears to be supported.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.42010 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Dalalakis, Jenny E. |
| Contributors | Gopnik, M. (advisor), Piggott, G. (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 (Department of Linguistics.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001557712, proquestno: NQ29917, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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