Gisela Håkansson
3. A study on Swedish children with SLI
The aim of this section is to present a reanalysis of data from Swedish children with SLI (Håkansson 1997, 2001; Håkansson & Hansson 2000) and to propose an explanation to the seemingly contradictory one mentioned above. Three aspects contribute to make this study different from the ones discussed above. The first and most crucial difference is that this study uses PT as its theoretical framework. This means that it analyzes the language production of children with SLI bottom-up, as if they were learners, in order to determine which level of the processability hierar-chy they are able to produce. Because the children are diagnosed with SLI, I do not expect them to be able to process all levels; and because the hierarchy is implica-tional, I expect them to stop at a certain level. If all children stop at the same level of processability, this level may be interpreted as a critical feature of SLI. The other two differences between this study and those mentioned above are methodological and stem from the way data is analysed in the PT framework. The criterion for acquisi-tion is based on productive use, and not on percentage correctness. One minimal pair is enough to show that the child differentiates for example singular from plural form of a noun – this is labelled the emergence criterion. Finally, the production from each individual is analysed and the results are given for individual children (To illustrate the point the results will also be given as group means).
3.1 Grammatical structures in Swedish
In Pienemann and Håkansson (1999) Swedish grammar was outlined from the perspective of processing complexity. Here, some of the morphological and syn-tactic phenomena will be presented, in the order in which they are predicted to emerge in the acquisition of Swedish. The following structures will be analysed:
suffixes on verbs, agreement in VP, subject-verb inversion, and the specific sub-ordinate clause word order. The structures can be found on different levels in Table 1 below. For practical reasons, I will use the PT hierarchy that compiles both morphology and syntax in the same table. Table 1 illustrates the five levels of pro-cessing procedures and their morphological and syntactic outcome for Swedish.
70 Gisela Håkansson
Table 1. Processing procedures applied to Swedish (after Pienemann & Håkansson 1999) PROCESSING
PROCEDURE MORPHOLOGY SYNTAX Swedish examples 5 Subordinate (‘there is the child who not can walk’)
procedure present – past hoppar – hoppa-de
‘jump – jumped’
1 Word/lemma invariant forms single constituent ‘words, chunks’
The children are expected to produce the structure in the order bottom – up.
Level 1, invariant forms, is not analyzed. At level 2, the category procedure, we find suffixes, which for example, mark simple tense (present and past) on verbs. Level 3 involves an exchange of information between elements within the same phrase, and the unification of the diacritic features is visible via agreement morphology.
The VP agreement demonstrates an exchange of grammatical information. There is unification of features between auxiliary and main verb to ensure that only one verb is marked for tense. See (7), below:
(7) [äter]VP [[har]Aux-pres [ätit]V-supine]VP ‘eat’ ‘has eaten’
Swedish perfect tense consists of the auxiliary har (‘have’) and a main verb in supine form. The supine is a non-finite form of the verb and cannot be used in isolation in main clauses. Since the compound tense involves an exchange of infor-mation between two constituents in the phrase, it is predicted that perfect tense will appear later than present and past tense in the development of Swedish.
At the level of interphrasal morphology (level 4), the different grammatical functions of the constituents in the clause are identified and the verb is placed in second position (V2), in front of the negation. Swedish, in contrast to many other Germanic languages, does not have subject-verb agreement markers. Instead, the processing of this level is realized in the subject-verb inversion, which is obligatory
PT and children with SLI 71 in topicalized declaratives. Exchange of information between phrases is situated higher than exchange within phrases on the processability hierarchy. Thus the subject-verb inversion is predicted to appear later than the perfect tense.
At the top of the processing hierarchy (level 5) we find the subordinate clause procedure, which is an exchange of grammatical information between main clause and subordinate clause. In Swedish, word order in subordinate clauses is different from the word order in main clauses. The V2-rule is only applied in main clauses, not in subordinate clauses. In subordinate clauses the negation is placed before the finite verb. Subordinate clauses can be expected to be processable after inver-sion in main clauses is applied, since there is a need of exchange of grammatical information between the clauses in order to treat the subordinate clause as a part of the main clause.
Concluding this section, I will summarize the PT predictions for the order of processability of Swedish structures.
i. Simple tense (level 2) before compound tense (level 3)
ii. Compound tense (level 3) before subject-verb inversion (level 4) iii. Subject-verb inversion (level 4) before subordinate clause word (level 5) 3.2 Material and methods
Twenty Swedish-speaking children participated in the study, 10 of whom are diag-nosed with SLI (aged 4;0 – 6;3, mean age 5;1), and 10 children with typical develop-ment (TD; aged 3;1 – 3;7, mean age 3;4). They were matched for utterance length.
All children were tested with material designed to create obligatory contexts for the targeted structures (simple and compound tense, NP agreement, subject verb inver-sion, negated subordinate clauses). The entire procedure was recorded. The inter-viewer used a coding form to transcribe the elicited utterances. In addition to this form, parts of the dialogue were transcribed. As mentioned above, what is counted is production or non-production of grammatical structures at different levels of pro-cessing complexity, not correctness. This means, for example, that irregular verbs inflected as regular by the children (e.g. drickte ‘drinked’ instead of drack ‘drank’) are not analyzed as errors but as examples of productive past tense morphology.
4. Results
The results are first given as group means where the children are treated as two homogenous populations. Then their individual performance is discussed, pre-sented in implicational scales. As illustrated in Figure 1, the group means show a difference between the two groups of children.
72 Gisela Håkansson
Figure 1. Use of simple tense, VP agreement, subject-verb inversion and subordinate clause word order in % of obligatory contexts by 10 children with SLI, and 10 typically developing children (TD)
At the group level, the results reveal that the TD group outperforms the SLI on all structures: tense, VP agreement, inversion and subordinate clause word order.
The differences between the groups are smaller for lexical and phrasal morphology (levels 2 and 3), than for inversion (98% occurrences in obligatory contexts for TD and 40% for SLI and) and subordination (40% occurrences for TD and none for SLI). But what about individual variation? Do all children with SLI vary in their production of inversion, or are some children using inversion and some not?
To answer this question and account for the individual variation, the data are now presented in another way, from the point of view of each individual’s performance. In the implicational table below the children are ordered accord-ing to production or non-production of the structures under discussion. A plus in the table means that there are at least two contrasting structures. For tense, there is systematic form variation on the same verb, and the verb is used both in present and past. For VP agreement the same verb has to be used both in finite form (present or past) and in infinite form (supine or infinitive) with an auxiliary. For a plus in inversion, there has to be at least two clauses with a topicalized element and verb inversion (plus examples with subject-initial clauses as contrast). Finally, for a plus in subordinate clause word order, there must be at least two cases of negation in front of the finite verb in a sub-ordinate clause and two cases of a negation after the verb in a main clause.
The figures indicate how many occurrences of obligatory contexts (e.g. 5/10 means five occurrences in 10 obligatory contexts). Observe that the number of obligatory contexts may differ between children. For example, Fabian produces
PT and children with SLI 73 seven sentences with topicalized adverbials, whereas Krista only produces three sentences with topicalized adverbials. Neither of them produces the required subject-verb inversion.
Table 2. Implicational order of structures used by ten children with SLI Level 2.
When the children are ordered this way, it is evident that the variation between individuals is not random, but systematic. The structures seem to have an increas-ing degree of difficulty. All children are able to produce structures at the lexical and phrasal stages (stages 2–3) but only four children (Robert, Hanna, Tony and Hillevi) are able to produce structures at the inter-phrasal stage (level 4). This result can be interpreted as an indication that the inter-phrasal stage and the next stage are “vulnerable structures” in Swedish.
It is particularly striking that there are no examples of subordinate clause word order in the children with SLI. This structure was elicited by a game, where the children were expected to pick cards from a plate and tell what they had got.
For example, “I got the boy who not could swim”. This structure caused major problems for the children with SLI.
5. Discussion
The results of the analyses reveal that the Swedish-speaking children with SLI differ from English-speaking children by not being particularly poor in tense
74 Gisela Håkansson
morphology. They supply tense suffixes to verbs in a consistent manner (74%
of obligatory contexts, not very far from the 84% by the younger TD children).
Also the analyses of NP and VP agreement show only a small difference between children with SLI and the TD children. The qualitative analysis is revealed in the analysis of inverted word order and subordinate clauses. The inversion rule is used to a much higher degree by the TD children (98%) than by the SLI children (40%).
Furthermore, analysis of individual children level reveals that it is not just a matter of lower proficiency in general, but rather that the children are at different devel-opmental levels. Only four of ten children with SLI make use of the subject-verb inversion rule at all. Six children always use subject-verb word order. The specific subordinate clause word order, on the other hand, is a structure that is never used by the children with SLI.
These findings cannot be accounted for by the hypotheses mentioned above:
the feature blindness hypothesis (Gopnik 1994), the missing agreement account (Clahsen 1992), the extended optional infinitive hypothesis (Rice & Wexler 1996) nor the surface hypothesis (Leonard 1989). All these hypotheses predict a mor-phological problem, not problems with word order. The Representational Deficit for Dependent Relationships (Van der Lely 1998) could possibly be referred to in explaining the results, since both inversion and subordination have to do with linking elements to each other. But this can only be discussed on the basis of mean values, and there is no explanation of the individual differences as shown by the Swedish children with SLI. How can we account for the fact that four of the children use inversion and six of them do not use inversion?
If a developmental perspective is used instead of a view based on deficient rep-resentations, it is easier to explain the Swedish results. According to PT, the mor-phosyntax emerges gradually, in implicationally ordered stages. The six children who are unable to process and produce subject-verb inversion are at earlier stages in their development than the four children who do use inversion. Thus, the four children who do use inversion are able to produce structures from earlier stages.
Can PT also account for vulnerable structures in other languages? I have argued that it is not the overt morphological or syntactic markings that pres-ent problems for SLI children, but rather the level of grammatical processability that underlies them. Due to typological differences between languages, language impairment presents itself in different structures, but they may have the same underlying processing demands. A possible explanation for the observed differ-ence between English and Swedish children with SLI might be that the English and the Swedish subjects happen to be at different levels of the processability hier-archy. Hypothetically, the English subjects may be at level 1, with no productive morphology, whereas the Swedish subjects are able to process level 2, i.e. tense morphology. The explanation can also lie in the typological differences between
PT and children with SLI 75 Swedish and English. In Swedish, verb tense is less complex since it is possible to separate tense from finiteness, whereas in English tense markings are insepa-rable from agreement markers. In terms of processability, this would mean that the Swedish simple tense markers are level 2 markers (lexical morphology) whereas the English markers are level 4 markers (S-procedure).
The developmental perspective and PT hierarchy can be used to explain the Italian data as well. As mentioned above, the vulnerable structures in Italian are arti-cles and object clitics, not bound morphology. Object clitics are placed at a high level (S-procedure) of the Italian hierarchy (Di Biase & Kawaguchi 2002) and they can be expected to be processable at a late stage in language development. Tentatively, also the problems with causative and passive morphology described for Japanese children with SLI (Fukuda & Fukuda 2001) can be described within the develop-mental framework of PT. Below, the problem areas for English, Italian, Japanese and Swedish children with SLI are summarized in a PT hierarchy of morphosyntax.
Table 3. Processing procedures in English, Italian, Japanese and Swedish. Highlighted areas represent structures that have been reported as problematic in children with SLI in respective language
PROCEDURE VP AGREEMENT AUX + V AUX + V Vte-V
Vte-PROG AUX + V 2. CATEGORY
PROCEDURE LEXICAL
MORPHEMES tense marking tense marking tense marking tense marking 1. LEMMA
Table 3 demonstrates that the problems for children with SLI are placed at the cor-responding level and above for Italian, Japanese and Swedish. The only exception is English, and, as mentioned above, it can be argued that tense marking in English requires other processing procedures than in the other languages, since it has to be combined with the inter-phrasal processing of 3rd person singular to express present tense.
76 Gisela Håkansson 6. Conclusion
One important finding of this study is the value of studying individuals instead of group means. The variation found in the present study is not random but highly systematic. What was obscured by the group means was that the individual Swedish children with SLI differed from the typically developing children to a cer-tain degree. This suggests that it is fruitful to use a developmental perspective and to study SLI children as individuals on different levels, instead of regarding them as a homogenous population with a common deficit.
The findings from the study also highlight the importance of investigating the processes behind surface structures in cross-linguistic comparisons. Processabil-ity Theory is a useful paradigm here. The study offers three convincing examples.
First, the analysis reveals that what is traditionally seen as “tense morphology”
relies on different processes in English and Swedish. In English, present tense in the third person singular cannot be separated from inter-phrasal agreement. In Swedish, the tense suffix only involves a marking of a diacritic feature of the verb, and is therefore processable at level 2. This means that it is easier to process present tense morphology in Swedish than in English. Secondly, Swedish grammar pres-ents other problems. The SLI-children in this study differ from the TD children in the production of word order in topicalized constructions. For the processing of this structure, there has to be an exchange of grammatical information between constituents, just like in the English third person singular. The third crosslinguistic example is the case of object clitics in Italian. This is also a structure that is found at the inter-phrasal stage.
These three examples show that the assumption that English SLI children, Ital-ian SLI children and Swedish SLI children have different problems is indeed super-ficial; in fact, these problems have the same source: the exchange of grammatical information between constituents at the inter-phrasal level. In other words, the problem is the same, but it is realized in different structures in the three languages.
These findings suggest that it might be fruitful for future cross-linguistic research of SLI to use the predictions from PT to find out what the vulnerable structures are, focusing on the inter-phrasal stage of processability.
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