title: Specific language impairment in a morphologically complex agglutinative Indian language-Kannada.
abstract: Specific Language Impairment (SLI) remains an underinvestigated disorder in morphologically complex agglutinative languages such as Kannada. Currently, only a few case reports are available on SLI in Dravidian languages. The morphological complexity inherent to Dravidian languages such as Kannada provides a potential avenue to verify one of the two prevailing accounts of SLI: the morphological richness theory and CGC (Computational Grammatical Complexity) hypothesis. While the previous theory predicts the relatively spared performance of children with SLI (CwSLI) on syntactic morphology in morphologically complex languages, the latter predicts a diametrically opposite performance. Data from a group of 15 Kannada-speaking CwSLI supported the morphological richness theory, and further revealed five distinct profiles of SLI. The results of this study reflected that CwSLI learning the agglutinative language (Kannada) as compared with language-matched children without SLI, displayed some shared deficits (e.g., in phonological processing on a non-word repetition task) with CwSLI learning English. However, CwSLI learning the morphosyntactically rich language Kannada differed remarkably from English-learning CwSLI by not showing deficits in syntactic morphology relative to language-matched peers (e.g., PNG, verb, tense, case, and pronoun).
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing, School of Allied Health Sciences (SOAHS), Manipal University, Manipal, Karnataka, India. Electronic address: tiwarishivani.2009@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Shivani
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tiwari
authors.affiliation: The Com-DEALL Trust, 224, 6th 'A' Main, II Block, HRBR Layout, Bangalore 560043, Karnataka, India. Electronic address: prathibha.karanth@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Prathibha
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Karanth
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing, School of Allied Health Sciences (SOAHS), Manipal University, Manipal, Karnataka, India; School of Allied Health Sciences (SOAHS), Manipal University, Manipal, Karnataka, India. Electronic address: b.raja@manipal.edu.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Rajashekar
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D007802:Language; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D008297:Male; D014706:Verbal Learning
keywords: Agglutinative; Kannada; Morphosyntax; SLI