SLI summary

[Ann Peters]

Thanks for all your responses to my query about SLI.
I received replies from Theodor Marinis, Heather van der Lely, Etti Dromi,
Carol Miller, Lise Menn, Gina Conti-Ramsden, Jussi Niemi, Keith Nelson,
Janis Oram, Paula Menyuk, Gisela Szagun, Johanne Paradis, Kristina Hansson,
Judith Johnston, Melanie Schuele and Judy Vander Woude
Here is a summary:

General caveat from Heather van der Lely:
. . . bear in mind that SLI is a heterogeneous disorder--
and so you need to look carefully at the subject description
to know if you are looking at the same sort of children.

1. CAN YOU DIRECT US TO A REASONABLY COMPREHENSIVE  LIST OF
RECENT RESEARCH IN SLI, PARTICULARLY IN LANGUAGES OTHER THAN
ENGLISH?
Most respondants mentioned:
(1) Leonard, L.B. 1988 "Children with SLI" MIT press
(2) Bishop, Dorothy 1997, "Uncommon understanding: Development
and disorders of comprehension in children" Psychology Press:
Hove UK.
(3) In addition, there is a special three volume issue of
the journal "Language Acqusition" coming out in May ...
in which there are papers on children with SLI speaking
French (Jakubowicz, Nash, Rigaut & Gerard);
Italian (Bottari et al);
German (Hamann, Penner & Lindner) as well as a futher four papers
on English speaking children with SLI (Ingham, Fletcher &
Schelletter; Wexler, Schuetze & Rice; Goad; and van der Lely).

SLI IN FINNISH:
Jussi Niemi & Minna H at gg: Syntax at late stages of acquisition: Experiments
with normal and SLI children. In Ben Maassen & Paul Groenen (eds.),
Pathologies of Speech and Language: Advances in Clinical Phonetics and
Linguistics. Whurr (1999). [due out in April]
Jussi Niemi (to appear, 1999): Production of grammatical number in Specific
Language Impairment: An elicitation experiment on Finnish. Brain and Language.

SLI IN GERMAN:
1)  Lindner, K. & Johnston, J. (1992). Grammatical morphology in
language-impaired children acquiring English or German as their
first language: A functional perspective. Applied Psycholinguistics,
13, 115-129.
2) Schoeler, H., Fromm, W, & Kany, W. (1998). Spezifische  Sprachentwicklungsstoerung und Sprachlernen. Heidelberg:
Edition Schindele.

SLI IN GREEK:
Dalalakis, J. (1996): Developmental Language Impairment: Evidence
from Greek and its Implications for Morphological Representation.
Ph.D. McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.
Stavrakakis, V. (1996): SLI in Greek: Evaluation of person-number
agreement, case assignment to overt subject pronouns and tense
marking. M.A. Thesis, University of Essex.

SLI IN SWEDISH:
1) Haakansson, G. (1998). Language impairment and the realization of
finiteness. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughes, H. Littlefield & H. Walsh (Eds.),
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Boston University Conference on
Language Development, vol. 1 (pp. 314-324). Cascadilla Press.
2) Haakansson, G. & Nettelbladt, U. (1996). Similarities between SLI and
L2 children. Evidence from the acquisition of Swedish word order. I:
J. Gilbert & C. Johnson (Eds.), Children's language, 9. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
3) Hansson, K.(1997a). Patterns of verb usage in Swedish children with SLI:
and application of recent theories. First Language, 17, 195-217.
4) Hansson, K. (1998). Specific language impairment in Swedish. Grammar and
interaction. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Lund University.
5) Hansson, K., and Nettelbladt, U. (1995) Grammatical characteristics of
Swedish children with SLI. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38,
589-598.

2. HAS ANYBODY DONE ANY WORK ON PRODUCTION OR PERCEPTION
OF RELATIVE CLAUSES BY SLI CHILDREN?
(1) Van der Lely's group is working on this but not yet ready to publish.
(2) Gisela Haakansson and Kristina Hansson are presently finishing an
article on the comprehension and production of relative clauses in Swedish
children with SLI. Preliminary results show that these children (aged 4-6)
have marked difficulties to produce this structure, whereas they manage
better in tests of comprehension of relative clauses, i.e. they show a
marked dissociation between comprehension and production. When retested
six months later, five out of ten children had acquired mastery of the
production of relative clauses, whereas the remaining children showed the
same pattern as in the first testing.
(3) Melanie Schuele <Schuele at asu.edu>:
I have done some work on the production of relative clauses in children
with SLI. Sarita Eisenberg has done some recent work on comprehension
of relative clauses in children with SLI.

3. HAS ANYBODY WORKING ON SLI IN FRENCH FOUND WORD ORDER
ERRORS?
(1) The best person to ask about SLI in French is Celia Jakubowicz:
Jakubowi at idf.ext.jussieu.fr
Celia Jakubowicz and colleagues in Paris have a paper in press in
Language Acquisition
and will also contribute to this year's BUCLD proceeedings.
(2) Another reference on French SLI:
LeNormand, M. T., Leonard, L. & Mc Gregor, K. (1993).  A
cross-linguistic study of article use by children with specific
language impairment.  European Journal of Disorders of Communication,
28, 153-153.
(3) Johanne Paradis at McGill University in Montreal:
We have done some work on grammatical deficits
in French-speaking children with SLI.  One thing in particular we looked
at was the order of finite verbs vis-a-vis the negative marker, 'pas'.
We found that they did not make errors of the kind you list below,
and are, on the whole, accurate in their verb placement.  We presented
these data at the SRCLD 98 conference. We are just in the process of
writing it up now.


AGAIN -- THANKS TO ALL WHO RESPONDED!