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Part of
Specific Language Impairment: Current trends in research
Edited by Stavroula Stavrakaki
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 58] 2015
► pp. 253–286

The acquisition of past tense by Greek-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment

The role of phonological saliency, regularity, and frequency

 | University of Athens
 | University of Athens
The performance of 13 Greek-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) on past tense formation is compared to the performance of two control groups of typically developing (TD) children. It is shown that children with SLI have difficulties in the production of past tense forms compared to language or age-matched TD controls. It is argued that phonological salience or regularity does not affect the acquisition of past tense in children with SLI and TD controls. In contrast, regularity of aspectual formation and frequency of the verb form has an effect on the acquisition of the perfective past in children with SLI. Τhese results are discussed in relation to one morphosyntactic and one morphophonological account of past tense acquisition in SLI.
Published online: 11 August 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.58.11var
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