University of Groningen Specific language impairment in Dutch de Jong, Jan IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below. Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Publication date: 1999 Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database Citation for published version (APA): de Jong, J. (1999). Specific language impairment in Dutch: inflectional morphology and argument structure. s.n. Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum. Download date: 25-09-2021 Specific Language Impairment in Dutch: Inflectional Morphology and Argument Structure Jan de Jong Copyright ©1999 by Jan de Jong Printed by Print Partners Ipskamp, Enschede Groningen Dissertations in Linguistics 28 ISSN 0928-0030 Specific Language Impairment in Dutch: Inflectional Morphology and Argument Structure Proefschrift ter verkrijging van het doctoraat in de letteren aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen op gezag van de Rector Magnificus, dr. D.F.J. Bosscher, in het openbaar te verdedigen op donderdag 20 mei 1999 om 14.15 uur door Jan de Jong geboren op 17 september 1955 te Wageningen Promotores: Prof. Dr. P.J. Fletcher Prof. Dr. F. Zwarts Acknowledgements When a friend of mine recovered from a knee operation, he described the process as 'hell on toast'. Although I did not hlly understand the expression, it seemed a perfect description of the ordeal of writing a PhD thesis. I have approached the task as a solo adventure. Nevertheless, numerous people have been a great help and I want to give them credit for that. First of all, I want to thank the children who participated in the study. Their perseverance in performing the tasks was admirable and they were great company. The schools that I visited to collect the data were very hospitable. Data were gathered at three schools for language-impaired children: the Tine Marcusschool in Groningen, the Enkschool in Zwolle and the Alexander Roozendaalschool in Amsterdam. I also visited one mainstream school: De Kleihorn in Groningen. I am very thankful to the speech therapists, teachers and school directors who assisted me. Part of the control data was collected by a group of MA students in the Neurolinguistics program - I couldn't have managed without their help. The idea for this study came about during a winter week in Barcelona, when I had long talks with Paul Fletcher and Mike Garman. We decided that the time was ripe for a project about verb argument structure in language-impaired children. The idea was developed in collaboration with the University of Reading. Apart from Paul, four more whveldJ-tkhrcCln-el(in& Christina Schelletter and Indra Sinka. I have learned a lot from each of them and our meetings were very pleasant. The research design of the greater part of this study was a collaborative enterprise. I am very gratefbl to my Reading friends and I hope we will soon be able to reap the fruits of the cross-linguistic part of our enterprise. I have benefited from the contributions of two promotors. Part of the original proposal was written in Frans Zwarts' living room. Frans has a laissez faire style of supervising but also a talent for showing his enthousiasm at times when it is most needed. I thank him for his genuine interest in the project. Paul Fletcher, who co-wrote the proposal, was very helpfkl. I have good memories of the times spent at the Fletcher mansion in Reading and his e-mails from Hong Kong have often helped me. As for my scientific committee, I am gratehl to all three of them. Larry Leonard is one of the people I most admire in our research field. It was an honour that he joined the committee and supported me. Roelien Bastiaanse and Anne Baker both returned the manuscript with lots of valuable comments scribbled in the margins. Their criticism has improved the book in many ways. Gerard Bol was a great help. First of all, I want to thank him and Folkert Kuiken for the data I was able to use in Chapter 7 of this book. Gerard also made sure they were available in user-friendly files. In the final stages he convinced me that the book would be better after revision, so I gave it a few more months. He was right. As a member of the European Group on Child Language Disorders, I had the privilege of being in touch with many researchers in the field of specific language impairment. I thank my EUCLIDES friends for their interest and collegiality - having them around, either in the flesh or by e-mail has helped a lot. The same goes for many other colleagues - I have found that this research field attracts nice people. My Groningen roommates - Roelien, Klarien, Roel and Dirk - were supportive and good company. The same, of course, goes for my housemates at the Bruine Ruiterstraat - Frank, Gerard and Roelien - we had a nice community of expatriates assembled there. I will not mention all my former colleagues in Groningen - I just want them to know that every bit of assistance and support they gave me is much appreciated. In the later stages of writing, Jan-Wouter Zwart screened some of the prose on linguistics in this book. Roel Jonkers shared his experience as a PhD graduate with me and made sure I got all the details of the procedure right. Hanjo Esselman helped out with layout issues. Thanks to all of them. I am glad to have my fiiends Claire van Putten and Paul Visschedijk as my paranymphs. They are just the right people for the job. * Esther rejects the idea of thanking your girlfriend. I respect that. Let me just mention that the cover of this book is in her favourite colour. Curiosity was very much the driving force behind this study. Having read a lot about language impairment in other languages, I wanted to know what the key grammatical difficulties of Dutch children were. I hope some of my curiosity shines through. 1. INTRODUCTION 2. SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Specific language impairment 2.2.1 Definition 2.2.2 Symptoms of SLI 2.3 Approaches to SLI 2.3.1 Terminology 2.3.2 The search for causes: the medical model 2.3.3 The search for causes: new developments 2.3.4 Underlying processes explaining SLI 2.3.5 Intermezzo: what kind of explanation is given? 2.3.6 Linguistic problems, whatever the causes 2.3.7 Linguistic problems - linguistic causes 2.4 Classification 2.5 Grammatical SLI: a linguistic profile 2.5.1 Inflectional morphology 2.5.2 Word order 2.5.3 Argument structure 2.6 Grammatical SLI: linguistic theories 2.6.1 Fundional categories in linguistic theory 2.6.2 Surface Hypothesis 2.6.3 Sparse Morphology hypothesis 2.6.4 Missing Feature hypothesis / Implicit Rule Deficit hypothesis 2.6.5 Missing Agreement hypothesis 2.6.6 Differential Agreement Checking hypothesis 2.6.7 Representational Deficit for Dependency Relations 2.6.8 ~eia~edacquisition of functional categories 2.6.9 Extended Optional Infinitive Stage 2.7 Linguistic explanations of specific language impairment - general remarks 2.8 Conclusion 3. RESEARCH METHOD 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Research questions 3.3 Subjects 3.3.1 Selection of the language-impaired children 3.3.2 Selection of the normally developing children 3.3.2.1 Measures for matching 3.4 Method 3.4.1 Research question 1: Tense and agreement 3.4.1.1 Matching 3.4.1.2 Task description 3.4.2 Research question 2: Verb argument structure 3.4.2.1 Spontaneous data 3.4.2.1.1 Matching 3.4.2.1.2 Data description 3.4.2.2 The experimental video task 3.4.2.2.1 Matching 3.4.2.2.2 Considerations on the selection of experimental tasks and items 3.4.2.2.3 Task description 3.4.2.2.3.1 Alternation: The causative alternation 3.4.2.2.3.2 Alternation: The locative alternation 3.4.2.2.3.3 Alternation: The dative alternation 3.4.2.2.3.4 Clausal complementation 3.4.2.2.3.5 Resultative secondary predication 3.4.3 Research question 3: Correlation of symptom areas 3.4.3.1 Subjects 3.4.3.2 Data description 3.4.4 Research question 4: Verb specificity 3.4.4.1 Matching 3.4.4.2 Task description 3.4.5 Statistical testing 4. TENSE AND AGREEMENT IN DUTCH 4.1 Introduction 4.1.1 Criteria for use of grammatical morphemes 4.1.2 Previous research on Dutch SLI: Bol and Kuiken (1988) 4.1.3 Typology of Dutch 4.2 Past tense marking 4.2.1 Past tense in SLI 4.2.2 Past tense: Analytical categories 4.2.3 Past tense: Results 4.2.3.1 Use of past tense morphemes in obligatory context 4.2.3.2 Relative share of past tense categories 4.2.3.3 Subtypes of past tense omission categories 4.2.3.4 Conclusion 4.2.4 Subgroup seledion 4.3 Snbject-verb agreement 4.3.1 Three types of agreement errors 4.3.2 Agreement: Analytical categories 4.3.3 Agreement: Results 4.3.3.1 Use of agreement morphemes in obligatory context 4.3.3.2 Subtypes of agreement enm 4.3.3.3 Conclusion 4.3.4 Subgroup selection 4.4.