The pragmatics of articles in Dutch children with Specific Language Impairment

Previous studies have found that the morpho-syntactic aspects of grammatical morphemes, including articles, pose problems for Dutch-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). In the present study it is demonstrated that article errors in Dutch children with SLI appear to be modulated by the pragmatic context to some extent. This study examines the pragmatic aspects of articles in 19 6- to 8-year-old children with SLI, comparing the results with those of 26 monolingual typically developing age-matched (TD-AM) and 17 language-matched (TD-LM) children. An elicitation task was used to test the specific discourse-new context (definite articles) and non-specific context (indefinite articles). In both contexts, the SLI group omitted articles more often than the TD-AM group, thus behaving similarly to the younger TD-LM group. The SLI group substituted articles more often than children in both control groups. Many children in the SLI group displayed variable behaviour and relatively many children with SLI used definite articles in non-specific contexts. We conclude that processing limitations in SLI may lead to less stable lexical knowledge of articles and hinder the successful integration of lexical, syntactic and pragmatic information that is required for target-like use of articles.