The acquisition of argument structure and functional categories by monolingual Spanish children with specific language impairmen

The purpose of this study was to assess morpho-syntactic competence of monolingual Spanish-speaking children with SLI by evaluating children's knowledge and use of argument structure and functional categories in contexts that are felicitous for evoking interpretable and valid responses. To explore children's knowledge and use of these grammatical aspects of the Spanish language, an experimenter-designed instrument containing four subtests was developed. These subtests were labeled as: Imitation Task (IT), Picture Selection Task (PST), Sentence Completion Task (SCT), and Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT). The participants of this study were 24 children aged between 4 to 6 years separated into two groups (12 children with typical language development, and 12 children with SLI), and a comparison group containing 6 adults. All of the participants were monolingual native speakers of Spanish living in the North-Central area of the Island of Puerto Rico. The results showed that the grammar of these children is not completely different from that of their peers, and that it is not necessarily a simpler version of their grammars. Even thought they have a preference for short utterances, SLI children rarely omit obligatory arguments in a given structure, and they understand what particular structure is projected by the verb. Also, they understand which elements are needed and which ones can be left out or substituted in different verb phrases, they know how to properly position these elements, and they are capable of conveying a message. In terms of functional categories, children with SLI know how to correctly use past and present tense morphology, and despite their preference for omitting non-salient elements in the sentence, they are capable of marking gender and number agreement on determiners/nouns and pronouns, and differentiate differential object marking from dative a marker. The data from this study supports the conclusion that their grammars are fully developed, and those elements and operations that are part of the inflectional system are processed as optional features of the language that only provide extra information that is not necessary to the discourse.