Verb marking errors in Children with Developmental Language Disorder: A corpora study

The current study will extend Pine et al’s (2008) study, which explored whether typically developing English-speaking children would show similar patterns of ability across different tense-marking morphemes as the ATOM model predicts, by considering third person singular ‘-s’, and first- and third-person singular auxiliary and copula ‘BE’ in children with DLD with a view to comparing our results with those in the original study and establishing whether they also hold true for this atypical population. As with the Pine et al. (2008) study, we will start at a point at which each child has produced at least two correct instances of each of the relevant morphemes.

Overall, the following research questions will be addressed:
1. What are the provision rates for third person singular present tense and third person singular forms of copula and auxiliary BE in children with DLD and how do they differ from each other?
2. What are the provision rates for third person singular copula
BE and third person singular auxiliary BE in contexts with lexical and
pronominal subjects in children with DLD and how do they differ from each other?
3. What are the provision rates for copula BE and auxiliary BE with
the third person singular pronominal subjects It and He and the first
person singular subject I and how do they differ from each other

To do this, transcripts from the Conti-Ramsden 3 corpus of 4 children with DLD will be coded for the presence and absence of the relevant morphemes in obligatory contexts and mixed-effects logistic regression models will be run on the data.

A detailed discussion of the study is provided in the document attached.