Elicitation of the passé composé in French preschoolers with and without specific language impairment

Abstract

This study examines inflectional abilities in French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) using a verb elicitation task. Eleven children with SLI and age-matched controls (37– 52 months) participated in the experiment.We elicited the pass´e compos´e using eight regular and eight irregular high frequency verbs matched for age of acquisition. Children with SLI showed dissimilar productive verb inflection abilities to control children (even when comparing participants with similar verb vocabularies and mean length of utterance in words). Control children showed evidence of overregularization and sensitivity to morphological structure, whereas no such effects were observed in the SLI group. Error patterns observed in the SLI group demonstrate that, at this age, they cannot produce pass´e compos´e forms in elicitation tasks, even though some participants used them spontaneously. Either context by itself might therefore be insufficient to fully evaluate productive linguistic abilities in children with SLI.