REFLECTION ON THE AGREEMENT AND TENSE OMISSION MODEL OF SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY
msra
摘要
On the basis of the Leonard corpus in the Child Language Data Exchange System, the present paper tries to evaluate Wexler, Schütze & Rice's (1998) two-factor account of specific language impairment (SLI), the Agreement and Tense Omission Model (ATOM), and to figure out the nature of syntactic errors made by SLI children. The result shows that the SLI children in the Leonard corpus did experience difficulties in the use of the third-person, singular, present tense -s and the preterite verb forms as predicted by ATOM. However, it is found that these SLI children mark tense better than agreement. ATOM cannot explain such a discrepancy. In addition, it is shown that case marking is unimpaired in these children's grammars. Therefore, an alternative account which claims that nominative case is assigned by an interpretable mood feature on T is adopted in order to account for the findings here. Moreover, it is found that these SLI children do not have any problem with A-movement. This suggests that their agreement marking errors are not due to the underspecification of the agreement feature on T as proposed by ATOM. They may instead be merely spellout errors. By contrast, it was shown that these SLI children's problems with auxiliary inversion may be due to the underspecification of the tense feature. Hence, this indicates that their tense marking errors are caused by the underspecification of the tense feature on T. However, the proposal that the interpretable tense feature may sometimes be underspecified requires the functional head T to have another interpretable feature: mood. Such an amendment prevents the derivation of sentences from crashing at semantic interface. In summary, the primary deficit in SLI children is shown to be the specification of the tense feature, and this is arguably due to the fact that tense is a conceptually complex notion.
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