title: Grammatical sensitivity and working memory in children with language impairment.
abstract: Children with primary language impairment (LI) show a deficit in processing different grammatical structures, verb inflections, and syntactically complex sentences among other things (Clahsen-Hansen 1997; Leonard et al. 1997). Cross-linguistic research has shown that the pattern of performance is language-specific. We examined grammatical sensitivity to word order and agreement violations in 50 Hungarian-speaking children with and without LI. The findings suggest a strong association between sensitivity to grammatical violations and working memory capacity. Variations in working memory performance predicted grammatical sensitivity. Hungarian participants with LI exhibited a weakness in detecting both agreement and word order violations.
authors: The Graduate Center of the City University of New York ; Barczi Gusztav College of Special Education, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary.
authors: Klara
authors: K
authors: Marton
authors: Luca
authors: L
authors: Campanelli
authors: Lajos
authors: L
authors: Farkas
keywords: childhood language impairment; grammatical sensitivity; verb agreement; word order; working memory