Grammaticality of Tag Questions as a Longitudinal Morphosyntactic Marker of Children With Specific Language Impairment Compared to Peers Ages 5-18 Years.
Mabel L Rice, Kathleen Kelsey Earnest, Lesa Hoffman
PMID 40460410WHAT IT FOUND
Children with SLI consistently struggled to judge the correctness of tag questions involving polarity errors, such as "She is looking for her mom, is she?" This difficulty persisted from age 5 to 18, unlike other grammar errors they learned to detect.
Key findings
01Children with SLI showed persistently lower performance than peers in judging tag questions with polarity errors (Double Affirmative and Double Negative) across the entire 5-18 year age range.
02Children with SLI caught up to unaffected peers in detecting other tag question errors, specifically Bad Agreement and Be Do Form Class, by age 18.
03The difficulty with polarity errors was not influenced by the child's nonverbal IQ, maternal education, or sex.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample consisted only of monolingual speakers of General American English, so results may not apply to multilingual children or those speaking other dialects. The study focused on children with normal nonverbal IQ (≥83); findings may not generalize to children with intellectual disabilities or lower nonverbal IQ. Receipt of speech-language services was not controlled for, though the authors note most participants did not receive services beyond early elementary school. The study is observational and longitudinal, not experimental, so it describes developmental trajectories but does not test interventions.
Declared interests
The study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (R01DC001803 and T32DC000052). The principal investigator was the first author. There are no commercial conflicts of interest reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a child's ability to detect other types of grammatical errors, such as subject-verb agreement, means they have resolved their SLI. This study shows that polarity errors in tag questions remain a specific and persistent deficit for adolescents with SLI, even when other grammatical skills appear to have caught up to peers.