ASPECT in Japanese Children with SLI

Abstract In English, ASPECT has been reported to be a difficult construction for children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) to acquire. However, there have been few reports concerning the acquisition of ASPECT in Japanese. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Japanese children with SLI would experience difficulty with the construction of ASPECT. The participants were Japanese siblings with SLI; a female junior high school student (Child A) and a male elementary school student (Child B). Utterances in spontaneous speech and the results of an elicited production task were analyzed. In the elicited production task, the data of 16 elementary school students with typical language development were also examined. The results were as follows. In spontaneous speech, the percent correct of Child A and Child B with the use of ASPECT was 100% and 94.4%, respectively. However, the percent correct on the elicited production task was 50.0% and 77.5%, whereas it was 95.9% with the 16 typically developing children. Furthermore, we found peculiar errors in which Child A and Child B used past-tense markers where expressions of ASPECT were required in sentences including adverbial expressions indicating past tense. In contrast, this type of error was not observed at all with the typically developing children. These results suggest that, although Japanese children with SLI produced few errors of ASPECT in spontaneous speech, they have difficulty acquiring ASPECT and use compensatory strategies to compensate for their inability to manipulate constructions of ASPECT.