Dissociations in SLI children's inflectional systems: A study of participle inflection and subject-verb-agreement

This paper presents results from a study of the acquisition of participles and subject-verb-agreement (SVA) in impaired and unimpaired monolingual German-speaking children. In earlier studies, we characterized specific language impairment (SLI) as a selective deficit of an otherwise normally developed linguistic system. We argued that the specific deficits of SLI children are restricted to inflectional morphology, and, in particular, that these children have problems establishing grammatical agreement relations. Consequently, we expected that the acquisition of participle morphology should not be impaired in SLI children, since German participle inflection does not involve grammatical agreement. The results of this study confirm that while SVA morphology is considerably affected in SLI, participle morphology is not impaired.