2018 Friday Poster 6762

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

Examining Task Related Effects on the Manifestation of Morphological Errors in French Speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment
S. Guven, E. Thordardottir, E. Rioux

The clinical diagnosis of SLI is widely relies on grammatical assessments. Clinical assessment methods such as story retell and spontaneous language sampling are commonly used to identify grammatical problems in these children both in mono- and bilingual settings. Although these methods are considered as useful and practical, there is also growing concern about the effects of task related factors on the production of grammatical errors in these children.

In a previous study with school-age children with SLI, Thordardottir (2008) showed that manifestation of grammatical morphology is differently affected by the different contexts in English than the Icelandic.

French has a rich morphology and we hypothesized that due to the increasing processing load in a demanding context(e.g. story retell) some vulnerabilities in the aspect of grammatical morphology may be seen as reported for Icelandic which has an quite complex inflectional system. The purpose of this study is whether or how two different language sampling contexts influence the accuracy of grammatical morphology in French speaking bilingual children with specific language impairment. We will report the preliminary qualitative and quantitative findings.

Method

Participants of this study were 12 preschool French-English speaking bilingual children with specific language impairment(SLI). All participants were 5-year old children(M= 5;4, SD =0,4). They were recruited and tested in Montreal. The diagnostic status of these children was established as part of this study by certified speech-language pathologists and using traditional diagnostic criteria(Leonard, 2014).

Language samples were collected in two different contexts: story retell task(more demanding communicative context) and conversation based language sample(less demanding communicative context). For the story retell task, a wordless picture book was used. The main interest of the language sample analysis was in the effect of context on the overall accuracy rate of grammatical morphology within each of contexts. We matched the total number of utterances for each context and coded the errors accordingly. Mean number of utterances for both contexts were 22.25(SD= 7.53). Comparisons between two conditions were conducted using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test which is the nonparametric version of paired samples t- test (reported with z statistic).

Results

According to the preliminary results, it has been found that context has an effect in the production of morphological errors. In more demanding context (story-retell) French-English speaking bilingual children with SLI showed much more morphological errors ((M = 3.67, SD = 4.16) than the less demanding context (spontaneous language sample), (M = 1.58, SD = 1.88) and the difference between the comparisons was significant (Wilcoxon z = 1.58, p =.05). This finding is in line with the results of previous research conducted with English and Icelandic speaking children with SLI (Thordardottir, 2008).

References

Leonard, L. B. (2014). Children with specific language impairment. MIT press.

Thordardottir, E. (2008). Language-specific effects of task demands on the manifestation of specific language impairment: A comparison of English and Icelandic. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 51(4), 922-937.