CANONICAL LINKING RULES - FORWARD VERSUS REVERSE LINKING IN NORMALLY DEVELOPING AND SPECIFICALLY LANGUAGE-IMPAIRED CHILDREN

Canonical linking rules for mapping thematic roles with syntactic func tions were studied. Three experiments were undertaken to investigate t he nature of productive forward linking (from semantics to syntax) and productive reverse linking (from syntax to semantics). I proposed tha t reverse linking, in contrast to forward linking, requires more detai led specification of the syntactic structure; that is, a syntactic rep resentation which specifies each particular syntactic frame and all th e argument positions within that frame. Six specifically language-impa ired children (aged 6;1 to 9;6) were matched on language abilities to 17 younger, normally developing children (language age 3;1 to 6;6). In Experiment 1 - forward linking - the children were shown the meaning of a novel verb and had to describe the event using the novel verb. Ex periment 2 - a comprehension task - required acting out sentences cont aining the newly learned verbs. In Experiment 3 - reverse linking - th e children were told a sentence with a novel verb and had to act out i ts meaning, assigning thematic roles on the basis of the syntactic fra me. Group and individual analysis generally revealed no significant di fferences between the specifically language-impaired children and the language age control children in Experiments 1 and 2, but a significan t difference was found for Experiment 3. The normally developing child ren showed a good use of productive forward and reverse linking. The s pecifically language-impaired children demonstrated good productive fo rward linking but were significantly worse at reverse linking. An inte rpretation of the data, showing differences in the syntactic represent ation required for forward versus reverse linking, can account for the findings. I propose that a deficit in the area of ''government'' or ' 'locality'' which underlies c-selection and specifies the syntactic re lationship between constituents can account for the data from this stu dy and the data from previous investigations of specifically language- impaired children.