BINDING THEORY AND GRAMMATICAL SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT IN CHILDREN

This study investigates the intrasentential assignment of reference to pronouns (him, her) and anaphors (himself, herself) as characterized by Binding Theory in a subgroup of ''Grammatical specifically language -impaired': (SLI) children. The study aims to (1) provide further insi ght into the underlying nature of Grammatical SLI in children and (2) elucidate the relationship between different sources of knowledge, tha t is, syntactic knowledge versus knowledge of lexical properties and p ragmatic inference in the assign ment of intrasentential coreference. In two experiments, using a picture-sentence pair judgement task, the children's knowledge of the lexical properties versus syntactic knowle dge (Binding Principles A and B) in the assignment of reflexives and p ronouns was investigated. The responses of 12 Grammatical SLI children (aged 9:3 to 12:10) and three language ability (LA) control groups of 12 children (aged 5:9 to 9:1) were compared. The results indicated th at the SLI children and the LA controls may use a combination of conce ptual-lexical and pragmatic knowledge (e.g., semantic gender, reflexiv e marking of the predicate, and assignment of theta roles) to help ass ign reference to anaphors and pronouns. The LA controls also showed ap propriate use of the syntactic knowledge. In contrast, the SLI childre n performed at chance when syntactic information was crucially require d to rule out inappropriate coreference. The data are consistent with an impairment with the (innate) syntactic knowledge characterized by B inding Theory which underlies reference assignment to anaphors and pro nouns. We conclude that the SLI children's syntactic representation is underspecified with respect to coindexation between constituents and the syntactic properties of pronouns. Support is provided for the prop osal that Grammatical SLI children have a modular language deficit wit h syntactic dependent structural relationships between constituents, t hat is, a Representational Deficit with Dependent Relationships (RDDR) . Further consideration of the linguistic characteristics of this defi cit is made in relation to the hypothesized syntactic representations of young normally developing children. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.