A Study On The Acquisition Of Modal Verbs Inmandarin-speaking Children With SLI

Foreign studies have reported that Specific Language Impairment (SLI) children’serrors in modal uses are mainly reflected in modal omission pattern. Nevertheless, tomy best knowledge, no study has been documented on the acquisition of modal formsby Mandarin-speaking children. The current study is to describe and explore the useof modal forms by Mandarin-speaking children with SLI.Thirty-six Mandarin-speaking children who are selected from four cities, namelyChangsha, Guangzhou, Hefei and Xinxiang have participated in my research:12specific language impairment (SLI) children who are selected through a series ofstandardized tests;12Typically-Developing-Age-Matched (TDA) group namely agecontrols; and12Typically-Developing younger children (TDY) namely languageability controls (MLU-matched). Production of modal auxiliaries has beeninvestigated through spontaneous language samples. The modal uses of three groupshave been compared in regard to the frequency of usage of the modal verbs:要yao‘want, must’ and会hui ‘know how, may’, which have been acquired by normalchildren before three years old. SPSS17.0has been adopted to analyze the collecteddata. The following results are found. First, a significant group difference is revealedbetween the SLI and TDA groups in the language samples for modal forms, but nogroup difference exists between SLI and TDY groups. Compared with the children inTDA group, SLI children focus on the dynamic modals expressing the notions ofdesires and ability with scarce uses of epistemic modals expressing the notions ofcertainty and uncertainty. Second, the modals that SLI children produce are in simpleconstructions, while TDA’s modal utterances are in much complicated ones. Third, children with SLI have significantly lower frequency of correct modal uses comparedwith both control groups, with omissions of modal verbs as the primary error type.Based on the results, the current study proposes a tentative analysis of SLIchildren’s difficulties in acquiring modal verbs. Specifically, the ideas are:(i) thesyntactic complexity involves syntactic movement in modal utterances causing thedifficulty for children with SLI to acquire modal verbs which are located higher thanlexical main verbs in the tree diagram;(ii) SLI children are Grammatical Conservative(GC), according to which children do not make productive, spontaneous use of a newsyntactic structure until they have both determined that the structure is permitted inthe adult language, and identified the adults’ grammatical basis for it. Thus, themajority of SLI children’s modal errors are modal omissions instead of the generalovert modal errors in their spontaneous speeches;(iii) SLI children’s limitation inacquiring epistemic modal uses can be accounted for by the DCM (DerivationalComplexity Metric), according to which SLI children have difficulties in theacquisition of the more complex structure and more syntactic movement. Sinceepistemic modals undergo more complex derivation, it could induce particulardifficulty for SLI children.The present study takes an initial step in exploring this particular topic on theacquisition of modal verbs in Mandarin-speaking children with SLI. Overall, theresults of this study support foreign studies indicating that SLI children may havedeficits in modals uses and the primary errors are modal omissions. Modal verbomissions can be regarded as part of a clinical marker for diagnosing SLI children.Moreover, the study may enrich the acquisition studies of Chinese modal verbs andshed new light to the nature of SLI children’s deficits in modal uses.