The Influence Of Morpheme And Meaning On Children's Word Learning In Chinese-specific Language Injury

The purpose of this study was to explore if the Chinese Specific Language Impairment children (SLI) have some difficulties in learning words, and if they can benefit from the meaningful morpheme in a word. At the same time, the effect of phonological working memory to SLI'word learning was also investigated.16 Chinese children with SLI and 16 age matched peers attended this study. After learning 32 new words by the fast mapping paradigm, two groups of children's word comprehension abilities and production abilities were tested. The words were divided into four categories:characteristic morpheme+categorical morpheme, characteristic morpheme+meaningless syllable, meaningless syllable+categorical morpheme, meaningless syllable+meaningless syllable. The amount of semantic information need to be processed and the requirements for phonological working memory were different between each type of words, which facilitated us to learn the abilities of semantic processing and working memory of two groups of children. To investigate it further, a word definition task and a nonword repetition task were also conducted in this study.Results showed that both word comprehension and production performances of SLI were significantly weaker than that of typical developing children which indicated the impairment of SLI. On the one hand, they have deficit in semantic processing. The evidences are:(1)In the comprehension task, SLI children performed much weaker while learning the categorical words, the characteristic words and the nonmorpheme words; (2)In the production task, SLI performed significantly worse than typical developing children in all types of words; (3)They performed much weaker in word definition task. On the other hand, they did have the abilities to make use of the morpheme that made the study easier which we can infer from the fact that their scores on words with morpheme were significantly higher than that on the nonmorpheme words. In the meanwhile, SLI have deficit in phonological working memory showed by the fact that they performed much worse than typical developing children in learning the nonmorpheme words. In addition, SLI also had a worse performance in word repetition task but we don't consider it as a sign of deficit in phonological working memory, because we think other factors may have involved.