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L M Bedore

Publications and source records attributed to L M Bedore.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Grammatical morphology deficits in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment.

The focus of this study was the use of grammatical morphology by Spanish-speaking preschoolers with specific language impairment (SU). Relative to both same-age peers and younger typically developing children with similar mean lengths of utterance (MLUs), the children with SU showed more limited use of several different grammatical morphemes. These limitations were most marked for noun-related morphemes such as adjective-agreement inflections and direct object clitics. Most errors on the part of children in all groups consisted of substitutions of a form that shared most but not all of the targets grammatical features (e.g., correct tense and number but incorrect person). Number errors usually involved singular forms used in plural contexts; person errors usually involved third person forms used in first person contexts. The pattern of limitations of the children with SU suggests that, for languages such as Spanish, additional factors might have to be considered in the search for clinical markers for this disorder. Implications for evaluation and treatment of language disorders in Spanish-speaking children are also discussed.

Child↗
PubMed2001

Assessing morphosyntax in Spanish-speaking children.

Accurate assessment of the morpho-syntactic skills of Spanish-speaking children depends on the clinician's understanding of the morpho-syntactic system and on the development of tasks that obligate the use of structures of interest. In this article, the nature and acquisition of the Spanish morpho-syntactic system is outlined. The aspects of the system that are likely to be difficult for children with language impairments and those that are critical to communicative competence are emphasized, as the clinician must take these into account when planning assessment tasks. The analysis of spontaneous language samples and the use of structured probes are discussed as alternatives for assessment. The naturalness and linguistic demands of assessment tasks are also considered because they are critical to understanding children's performance on morpho-syntactic tasks.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The effects of inflectional variation on fast mapping of verbs in English and Spanish.

To use morphological cues for syntactic bootstrapping, children must recognize that inflectionally varying words (e.g., pushes, pushed) are instances of the same word. Children who are exposed to languages with richer inflectional morphologies than English, such as Spanish, encounter instances of inflectional variation more often. Thus they may learn to recognize inflectionally varying words as instances of the same word at an earlier age than do learners of English. English-and Spanish-learning 3-year olds were taught novel verbs in a fast mapping task under two conditions: no-inflectional variation in which inflections did not vary between exposure and testing (e.g., neps, neps) and inflectional variation in which inflections alternated between exposure and testing (e.g., neps, nepped). Children's scores were significantly higher in the no-variation condition than in the variation condition. There were no significant differences between the performance of the language groups. These findings suggest that even children acquiring languages with relatively rich verbal inflection paradigms may not be able to consistently parse stems and inflections to associate inflectionally varying forms.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1998

Specific language impairment and grammatical morphology: a discriminant function analysis.

Discriminant function analysis was employed to determine if grammatical morpheme production could be used to classify preschool-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typically developing language skills. Three variables were included in the discriminant analysis: a finite verb morpheme composite, a noun morpheme composite, and mean length of utterance in morphemes. The children with SLI and age-matched controls were discriminated with high levels of accuracy, though the three variables did not yield identical classifications. Across two samples of typically developing children and children with SLI, the verb morpheme composite showed sensitivity exceeding 85% and specificity of 100%. In light of these results and growing evidence that problems with finite verb morphology continue into the school years in children with SLI, the verb morpheme composite was considered to hold promise as a clinical marker for SLI.

Child↗
PubMed1997

Three accounts of the grammatical morpheme difficulties of English-speaking children with specific language impairment.

Several hypotheses have been offered to explain the grammatical morpheme difficulties observed in the speech of children with specific language impairment. Three of the accounts that could be evaluated in English were the focus of this study: the extended optional infinitive account, the implicit rule deficit account, and the surface account. Preschoolers with specific language impairment, a group of age controls, and a group of younger children matched for mean length of utterance were evaluated in their use of several theory-relevant grammatical morphemes. The findings revealed advantages for both the surface and extended optional infinitive hypotheses. In contrast, a test of the predictions based on the implicit rule deficit account suggested that the children studied here were not experiencing a deficit of this type.

Child, Preschool↗