GRAMMATICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SWEDISH CHILDREN WITH SLI

Spontaneous speech samples from 10 Swedish children were collected and analyzed grammatically. The subjects consisted of 5 children with SLI and 5 MLU matched controls with normal grammatical development. The c hildren with SLI differed significantly from the controls in their mor e restricted usage of word order patterns and in number of grammatical errors. As in studies on English-speaking children with SLI, the Swed ish children with SLI had a large number of omissions of grammatical m orphemes. Verb-related errors were more common than noun-related error s. Contrary to reports on children with SLI acquiring other languages, however, word order errors were also very common in the Swedish child ren with SLI. A restricted usage of word order patterns in combination with errors of word order indicates that not only morphological defic its but also syntactic difficulties can be found in children with SLI relative to MLU controls, depending on the target language. The findin gs show the importance of cross-linguistic comparisons of children wit h SLI.