Gender agreement in SLI: A study on production and inflection of articles in German

Abstract

This study addresses the question of whether gender agreement is impaired in SLI German. Article production and gender marking on articles were examined in three groups of German-speaking children: 10 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), 10 age-matched typically developing (TD) children, and 10 TD children who were on average two years younger. Gender marking on articles did not reveal any evidence of an agreement deficit in the SLI group. Nevertheless, the children of the SLI group had a selective deficit in assigning the correct gender to neuter nouns. Regarding article production, it was found that article omissions were more frequent in the SLI group than in the age-matched TD group. However, these omissions cannot be clearly attributed to a deficit in gender agreement. The data indicate that article omissions may also reflect an avoidance strategy due to a lack of gender information. These results provide evidence for the ability of SLI children to acquire and use rule-governed syntactic computations. This is incompatible with accounts of SLI that posit a broad syntactic deficit in these children.