Production operations contribute to the grammatical morpheme limitations of children with specific language impairment

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) usually differ from typica lly developing children in the degree to which they use particular grammati cal morphemes. not in whether they nse these morphemes. Tn this study, a st ructural priming paradigm was used to determine whether a portion Of these children's inconsistent use might he attributable to processing demands dur ing the sentence formulation and production phase. In two experiments. pres choolers with SLI made greater use of grammatical morphemes (e.g., auxiliar y is) if the preceding prime employed the syntactic frame slid prosodic str ucture required in the target (e.g., prime: "The boys are washing the car"; target: "The horse is kicking the cow") than if it did not (e.g., prime: " The pig fell down": target: "The mouse is eating the cheese"). Priming effe cts were greater in these children than in a group of younger typically dev eloping children, consistent with the view that operations involved in sent ence formulation and production place especially heavy demands on the child ren with SLI. (C) 2000 Academic Press.