In Formal Features in Impaired Grammars: A Comparison of English and German SLI Children, by Harald Clahsen, Susanne Bartke, and Sandra Göllner, Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is discussed. SLI or developmental dysphasia is a language disorder which can affect expressive and receptive language. In 1901 Albrecht Liebmann discovered this condition in which the subjects’ general intelligence fell within normal range, and they did not have any hearing deficits or emotional or behavioral disturbances. There was no clear non-linguistic cause for their difficulty in acquiring grammar. There are several grammatical theories regarding SLI. One theory we will explore is the grammatical agreement deficit, according to which SLI children are said to have problems establishing grammatical relationships such as case and agreement between different elements of a phrase or clause. For example, in subject-verb agreement, person and number are not primary features of verbs. They are only realized on finite verbs, but provide information about the subject and, in this way, can be said to be controlled by the subject. It is this kind of feature control that is said to be impaired in SLI.
In this article, data from nine English and six German SLI subjects with respect to tense and agreement marking, the feature specifications of DP-subjects, and verb raising were compared. English and German SLI subjects achieve significantly lower scores for subject-verb agreement marking than for past tense or preterit tense marking. English SLI children do not produce any non-NOM subjects, even in sentences with bare
(uninflected) stems. Two kinds of structures which have been reported to be absent from the speech of unimpaired German-speaking children are productively used by SLI children: non-finite verbs raised to second position and root infinitives with fully-specified and case-marked DP subjects.
Before reading this article were you familiar with SLI? If you are familiar with it, have you had any experience with SLI students? As a teacher, what would you do to help SLI students? Do you think it would be a challenge to have SLI students in your class?
13 comments:
I was not familiar with SLI before I read the article. I am still not sure if I am familiar with it now. However, as a teacher I would be more than willing to help the SLI students in my classroom. I was unable to grasp what exactly SLI was but I know that whatever it may be it can be a serious problem for students with the condition and their English and Writing classes. I think it would be a challenge to have a SLI student in the classroom but it is a challenge with any student and all challenges have their rewards.
I was also not too familiar with SLI before reading this article. I am still a little unsure of it. I would love to experience a classroom with SLI students. I would like to see the teaching strategies that go into the learning process. It would definately be a challenge to teach a SLI student, but they are students just like everyone else and deserve the proper education.
I've never heard of SLI either. I wonder if autistic kids ould fall under this catagory because they have Specific Language Impairments. I've never had any experience with a SLI student, but I can imagine it would be tough. As a teacher I don't know how to work with these students, but I would hope if I were in that situation there would be someone to teach me how to teach them. It would be a challenge, but if I could help one student it would be worth it.
Before reading this article, I had never heard of SLI. Any impairment with speaking would put the child at a disadvantage so as a teacher I would do my best to make the child feel at ease in the environment. It said in the article that people who suffer from SLI specifically have problems with subject-verb agreement which I'm sure would make it difficult for them to communicate well with others. If I were teaching them I might try visual ways of showing them what is correct and what isn't. This way it is less about the language but what the language is doing instead.
Before reading this article I was never aware or SLI. Having SLI is associated with many complications. Especially regarding the use of sentences, and grammar within those sentences. I could imagine that this disorder makes it very difficult for these students to be able to communicate and understand many things. As as teacher I would give these students special attention regarding sentence diagramming so that they could further their understanding.
This was the first time that I had ever heard about SLI. I think that this is an important topic for educators to be informed about. It is impossible for teachers to be effective without a strong knowledge of this important subject. I also think it is important that teachers learn the warning signs of this condition. It is likely that there are many students who have this impairment but have not been diagnosed. These children would be held back because others around them do not understand the limitations that have been placed on them.
SLI is characterized by difficulty with language that is not caused by known neurological, sensory, intellectual, or emotional deficit. It can affect the development of vocabulary, grammar. Children with SLI may be intelligent and healthy in all regards except in the difficulty they have with language. They may in fact be extraordinarily bright and have high nonverbal IQs.
Children with SLI usually learn to talk late. It is not unusual to first encounter a child with SLI at age 3 or 4 years, with limited vocabulary and short utterances.
I was also unfamiliar with SLI before reading this article. Working with SLI students is a challenge, but teachers must find a way to help those students to learn. It is very important for teachers to understand SLI and the effect it has on the students that teacher is trying to teach.
Before reading this article, I had never heard of SLI before. If I were a teacher, and had SLI students in my class, I think it would be challenging to have a SLI student, but it would be something I would be very willing to experience and work with the student(s).
I also hadn't heard of SLI before reading this article. I would find it challenging to have a SLI student in my classroom, but would do whatever I could to help them to succeed.
I was not familiar with SLI before reading this article and I am still a little confused about it now. Since I am not going into teaching, I don't really know if I will ever run across this. But if I do happen to run across an SLI child, I will have a little bit better understanding of what they are going through having read this article.
I had never heard of SLI before reading this article. I do not know an SLI speaker, and have never had one in my classroom. I think it is important that student's needs are met within the classroom. That means that every teacher needs to accomadate the different learning styles, and disabilities, into the classroom. Since I was no quite clear on what SLI actually is; if I were to have an SLI student in my classroom I would need to do further research to understand.
I found some of this information from the topic, SLI students, quite interesting, but not as drastic as most langauge deficits. For instance, the article mentions, "...SLI children are said to have problems establishing grammatical relationships such as case and agreement between different elements of a phrase or clause. For example, in subject-verb agreement, person and number are not primary features of verbs." I honestly feel that most people have this problem; thus, making it a common grammatical error. As far as their deranged speech pattern, I find it to be problematic. I feel that placing any student whether if they have speech/writing impedimets or not, within a resourceful environment, they can learn the "proper" principles of standard English.
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