Judgments of Grammatically by Normal and Language-Disordered Children

Abstract

Fifteen linguistically normal children and 15 linguistically deviant children were presented with three types of agrammatical sentences. The subjects were asked to judge the sentences as right or wrong and to change the sentences judged as wrong, rendering them correct. The three types of agrammatical sentences represented rule violations of syntactic agreement (Type A), lexical restrictions (Type B), and word order (Type C). The two groups of children were compared in terms of the number of sentences of each type that were recognized as agrammatical. Those productions which represented the child’s correction of agrammatical sentences were subjected to descriptive analyses (percentages) with specific reference to the number of attempted changes and the number of those changes which demonstrated corrections of the specific deviation from well formedness. Results indicated that the two groups of subjects were significantly different in their ability to recognize grammatical errors in sentence Types A and C, but did not differ in their ability to recognize errors in sentence Type B. The descriptive comparison of the groups' verbal corrections reflected this trend, in that the language-disordered subjects made corrections specific to the error on more of the Type B sentences (for example, “The dog writes the food.”) than on Types A (for example, “'She will pick some flowers last week.”) or C (for example, “Get and come your dinner.”). Linguistically normal children accurately corrected 90.7% of the sentences judged as agrammatical; this percentage did not vary more than 1% across sentence types.