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The acqusition of grammatical morphology by children who are unable to speak

University of British Columbia

Most augmentative and alternative (AAC) systems do not allow preliterate children to manipulate and select grammatical morphemes while producing language output. To determine if this lack of productive control impedes acquisition of grammatical morphology, the acquisition of three grammatical morphemes was explored in children who are nonspeaking. A picture-selection comprehension task and a grammaticality judgment task were given to 20 children who are nonspeaking and 20 typically developing children matched by age equivalent score on a test of content vocabulary comprehension. Children in the nonspeaking group exhibited significantly more difficulty on both these tasks than typically developing children at the same content vocabulary comprehension level. Literate children in both groups were also given a structured written output task. Children who are nonspeaking tended to omit grammatical morphemes in their written output, whereas children in the typical group tended to include them. To rule out the possibility that these findings would be seen in any group of children with low content vocabulary comprehension levels, regardless of their ability to speak, a group of 15 atypical speaking children with a similar mean chronological age and content vocabulary comprehension level was also given these tasks. The atypical speaking youngsters did not do as well as children in the typical group, but they did do better than the children in the nonspeaking group. Clinical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-04-01

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6720

Audiology and Speech Sciences

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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