title: The acquisition of prosodic constraints on derivational morphology in typically developing children and children with SLI.
abstract: Aim of this study was to investigate at what age German children master prosodic and morphological constraints in the acquisition of the word formation paradigm -heit/-keit, which is comparable to English -ness, and whether children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have difficulties identifying the prosodic cues from the input. Derived words with -heit contain simple bases with final stress and those with -keit have complex bases with a weak final syllable. Three groups of typically developing children (four, six and eight years old) and 18 children with SLI (from 8 to 10 years) had to produce either -heit or -keit derivations in a sentence completion task. The results show that typically developing children mastered these derivations by the age of six only when both prosodic and morphological cues were present, while eight-year-old children performed almost adult-like. In contrast, most children with SLI did not produce systematic responses that follow prosodic and/or morphological constraints. The findings support the assumption that children with SLI are less sensitive to prosodic properties of grammatical forms than typically developing peers.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft, University of Marburg , Germany , and.
authors.forename: Ulrike
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Domahs
authors.forename: Karin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lohmann
authors.forename: Nicole
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Moritz
authors.forename: Christina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Kauschke
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007805:Language Development Disorders; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception