title: The use of grammatical morphemes by normal and language-impaired children.
abstract: An examination was made of the grammatical morpheme usage of normal children and language-impaired children matched at two different levels of mean utterance length. The language-impaired children displayed less grammatical morpheme usage than the normal children with equivalent mean utterance length. However, no use of alternative features of semantic importance by the language-impaired children was noted, suggesting that no unique patterns for acquiring language were in operation. Instead, it appears that the language-impaired children may have attached less communicative significance to grammatical morphemes.
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007806:Language Disorders; D008037:Linguistics