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Subject–Aux Inversion in Children with SLI

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Abstract

An elicited production study investigated subject–aux inversion in 5-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 2 control groups, typically-developing 5-year-old children and 3-year-old children matched by mean length of utterance. The experimental findings showed that children with specific language impairment produced subject–aux inversion in yes/no questions significantly less often than either of the control groups. However, the fact that lack of inversion is reflected in the input led to the proposal that children with specific language impairment choose the most economical grammatical option. For main clause wh-questions, children with SLI carried out subject–aux inversion at a rate that was not significantly different from the control groups. This finding suggests that these children have access to hierarchical phrase structure representations for questions and the relevant movement operations. In embedded wh-questions, where subject–aux inversion is not permitted, children with SLI implemented SAI more frequently than the control groups. Our interpretation of this finding is that once children with SLI acquire the subject–aux inversion rule, that they are slower to learn that embedded clauses present an exception to the rule.

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Notes

  1. When no auxiliary verb, modal or copula is present, the dummy verb DO is used.

  2. In English, have and be are exceptional verbs, demonstrating different linguistic behaviour from other main verbs. Unlike all other main verbs, they undergo movement from V to T in the structure. All other main verbs do not move from the V position.

  3. Some versions of linguistic theory assume movement leaves a ‘trace’ (e.g. Chomsky 1981). More recently, it is assumed that a ‘copy’ of the movement element is left behind (Chomsky 1995). We will assume that a copy is left behind as this is quite intuitive and easy to represent.

  4. In their paper, Rice and Blossom (2012) evaluate the linguistic knowledge of DO in children with SLI, and provide figures outlining the syntactic representations for each linguistic context in which DO appears. One of these is auxiliary DO in a question structure, which shows the necessary movement of the auxiliary verb with its Tense and Agreement features to C. Rice and Blossom (2012) assume children have access to this syntactic knowledge.

  5. If the wh-word is treated as an adjunct and simply attached to the beginning of a sentence it is not moved, and therefore there is no ‘gap’ in the question.

  6. This example works because the verb ‘eat’ does not require its object argument to be expressed (that is, the thing that is eaten). This is not the case with most verbs, however, so if children are combining ‘what’ with a predicate, they may end up with the object NP in situ, in questions such as ‘What the boy is kicking a ball?’.

  7. The study was approved by the Human Ethics Committee at Macquarie University as well as by the Department of Education in Western Australia.

  8. Children’s names have been changed for confidentiality.

  9. Eight of these 13 children omitted DO in some instances. Three out of the 13 children did not include auxiliary DO in any of their embedded clause questions.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CE1101021), www.ccd.edu.au. Kelly Rombough was supported by a PhD fellowship funded by the CCD. We thank the Language Acquisition Group at Macquarie University for their feedback and suggestions. We would like to thank all the children and their families who participated in our study.

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  1. Department of Cognitive Sciences, ARC Centre for Cognition and Its Disorders, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Kelly Rombough

  2. Department of Linguistics, ARC Centre for Cognition and Its Disorders, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Rosalind Thornton

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  1. Kelly Rombough
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Correspondence to Kelly Rombough.

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Rombough, K., Thornton, R. Subject–Aux Inversion in Children with SLI. J Psycholinguist Res 48, 921–946 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09640-3

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