Grammatical impairment of case assignment in Japanese children with specific language impairment

Abstract

This paper investigates the grammatical knowledge of 3 Japanese children, aged 9; 7-13; 3, with specific language impairment (SLI) concerning the grammatical Case, namely nominative, accusative and dative Case. In the investigation, an elicited production task was used. The obtained results are compared with data from 5 age-matched children with normal language development (NLD). The overall results show that performance of the children with SLI was poorer than that of the children with NLD in relation to Case assignment. Moreover, the findings also demonstrated that their performance with scrambled sentences differed most substantially. The implications of their atypical performance with Case assignment are discussed in terms of compensatory strategies supported by declarative memory.