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The spontaneous use of Hebrew verb forms by Israeli preschool children with and without sli The spontaneous use of Hebrew verb forms by Israeli preschool children with and without sli

Summary

The paper asks whether Hebrew-speaking preschoolers with Specific Language Impairment (HSLI) show the same verb-morphology weaknesses in everyday speech that earlier elicitation experiments revealed. Fifteen HSLI children (ages 4;2–6;1) were compared with fifteen much younger typically developing children (ND-L, ages 2;8–3;11). The two groups were pair-matched on MLU, MPU, sex and SES. Each child produced 200–300 spontaneous utterances in play or conversation. Every lexical verb was coded for root, tense, binyan pattern, person, number, gender and the source of its obligatory context.

Overall, the HSLI children used verbs about as well as their utterance length predicts. Both groups relied heavily on the simplest pattern, B1, and on unmarked forms. They produced almost no second-person past forms, and B5 verbs were absent entirely. These were exactly the forms that caused errors in elicitation. The authors read this as avoidance: in free talk, children steer away from demanding forms. Their deficit is therefore selective rather than global. The study argues that, for morphologically rich languages, elicited and spontaneous data should be combined.

Key points

  • Corpus size:
    • Utterances: 3,683 (HSLI) and 3,269 (ND-L).
    • Verb productions in the computerized database: 2,141 (HSLI) and 2,168 (ND-L).
  • Group matching was done on MPU, a morpheme-based Hebrew utterance-length measure (Dromi & Berman, 1982). Mean MPU was 4.03 for HSLI and 4.0 for ND-L.
  • B1 dominated verb use:
    • It accounted for 78.6% of HSLI verbs and 72.7% of ND-L verbs.
    • ANOVA showed a main effect of pattern and a group × pattern interaction.
    • No B5 verbs appeared in the spontaneous samples.
  • HSLI children produced more ungrammatical "stripped" verb forms: 22 versus 8 occurrences, t(28)=2.00, p<.05. In typical development, such forms normally vanish by about age two.
  • Earlier elicitation studies by the same group gave mean accuracy of 82% (HSLI) versus 86% (ND-L). Those studies located the HSLI difficulties as follows:
    • B5 in present tense.
    • B3 in tense/finiteness tasks.
    • Past-tense second person, which requires marking person, number and gender at once.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Free production can hide a weakness, because a speaker can simply avoid forms it cannot handle, while targeted probes force those forms into view; the two methods are therefore complementary. — For Mova (learn): Evaluate parsers and generators on both naturalistic corpora and constructed probe sets aimed at rare, hard constructions, so a good score on easy natural text cannot mask systematic gaps.
  • I2. The authors rank the difficulty of a form by how many abstract features it must encode at once (person + number + gender versus only two of these). — For Mova (tokens): Break down morphological tagging and lemmatization errors by the number of features each form carries, so failures can be traced to feature combinations rather than to individual words.
  • I3. The elicitation stories were designed so the experimenter's lead-in verb differed in tense or finiteness from the target, which ruled out simple imitation. — For Mova (learn): Build test items and negative controls in which the correct answer cannot be copied from surface material in the prompt, which shows whether the system actually computed the form.
  • I4. Each verb's obligatory context was tagged by its source: the linguistic frame, the experimenter's preceding question, or an ongoing physical event. — For Mova (frames): Record for each inferred role or implied element whether it came from syntax, from prior discourse or from world context, which keeps the inference explainable and auditable.
  • I5. Skewed usage, such as overusing the simplest pattern, is itself a diagnostic signal alongside accuracy. — For Mova (back): Compare the distribution of morphological and syntactic forms in generated text with that of reference text, to detect a generator that stays correct by retreating to the simplest constructions.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Hebrew & Aramaic · Semitic languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{dromi2008spontaneous,
  title = {{The spontaneous use of Hebrew verb forms by Israeli preschool children with and without sli The spontaneous use of Hebrew verb forms by Israeli preschool children with and without sli}},
  author = {Dromi, Esther and Blass, Anat},
  booktitle = {Ilha do Desterro 0},
  year = {2008},
  url = {http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/article/view/7447}
}

References

20 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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