Specific Language Impairment in Italian and English: Evaluating Alternative Accounts of Grammatical Deficits

Two groups of children with specific language impairment-a group acquiring Italian as their first language and a group acquiring English-were compared in terms of their use of grammatical morphology. Comparisons revolved around the differential predictions of three alternative accounts of grammatical deficits in children with specific language impairment. The Italian-speaking children made greater use of noun inflections, verb inflections and copula forms than their English-speaking counterparts matched according to mean length of utterance in words. Articles were used to a similar degree. The pattern of findings was most consistent with processing accounts, one based on morphological richness, the other on durational properties of grammatical morphology. However, both of these accounts require an additional provision or qualification to handle the data satisfactorily.