Spontaneous productions of infinitive clauses by English-speaking children with and without specific language impairment.
Amy Wilder, Sean Redmond
PMID 32290714WHAT IT FOUND
Children with developmental language disorder produced fewer true infinitives and made more errors than peers.
Subgroup analysis showed children with low nonverbal IQ or other conditions had significantly more difficulty with infinitive TO marking than those with specific language impairment alone.
Key findings
01Children with DLD produced significantly fewer true infinitive clauses than children with typical language skills.
02Children with DLD had a significantly lower accuracy rate for infinitive TO inclusion than children with typical language.
03Within the DLD group, children with low nonverbal IQ or concomitant conditions (Co-LI) were more prone to produce obligatory infinitive TO omissions than those with SLI profiles.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used cross-sectional data, so it cannot show how these difficulties develop over time. Subgroups with co-occurring conditions were small (n=5 for Co-TL, n=9 for Co-LI), limiting statistical power for those comparisons. Reliance on language samples rather than elicitation tasks meant the number of opportunities to use infinitives varied, potentially underestimating or overestimating proficiency. The study did not control for all potential confounding variables in the regression models.
Declared interests
The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). One author is a doctoral student funded by the other author's projects. The authors report no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not generalize these findings to all children with language disorders as having equal difficulty with infinitives. The study highlights that children with co-occurring low nonverbal IQ or other conditions are a distinct subgroup with more severe deficits, whereas many children with specific language impairment profiles may have largely mastered this structure by age 6 to 7.