title: Verb inflection in German-learning children with typical and atypical language acquisition: the impact of subsyllabic frequencies.
abstract: Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional verb paradigm than English. Using an elicitation task, the production of inflected nonce verb forms (3(rd) person singular with -t suffix) with either high- or low-frequency subsyllables was tested in sixteen German-learning children with SLI (ages 4;1-5;1), sixteen TD-children matched for chronological age (CA) and fourteen TD-children matched for verbal age (VA) (ages 3;0-3;11). The findings revealed that children with SLI, but not CA- or VA-children, showed differential performance between the two types of verbs, producing more inflectional errors when the verb forms resulted in low-frequency subsyllables than when they resulted in high-frequency subsyllables, replicating the results from English-learning children.
authors.affiliation: Linguistics Department, University of Potsdam, Germany. susott@googlemail.com
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ott
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Höhle
mesh_terms: D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics