Pronominal Case Judgment and Verb Finiteness Marking in Children with Specific Language Impairment

2nd Place Award in Social and Behavioral Science Category at the Denman Undergraduate Research ForumThis research project aims to study how children acquire certain grammatical constructions in their language. Specifically, I am studying children’s judgments of case marking (their ability to identify the correct type of pronoun in subject position) and verb finiteness (their ability to give a verb the correct tense, person and number marking) and am examining a possible correlation between these two constructions. While other studies have shown that pronominal case and verb finiteness appear to correlate in receptive tests, it has been impossible to show that this correlation was not the product of a more general correlated development of all dimensions of language. To that end, I am testing the correlation of verb finiteness and case, but, in order to make that correlation even more convincing, I am also testing, using the same experimental format, a grammatical construction called the Binding Principle. Given that there is no theoretical connection between verb finiteness and the Binding Principle, I predict that they should not correlate, thus demonstrating the uniqueness of the correlation between the development verb finiteness and case. In this way, I hope to contribute to what is known about the relationship between the development of finiteness and case in typically-developing English speakers. The plan is that the sample we gather can then be used as a control group against which data from children with SLI can be compared in a future research project. We have piloted the Binding Principle test and have added its "best" items to the "best" items used in prior studies looking at verb finiteness, pronoun case and subject-auxiliary inversion. We used item-total correlation tests to determine these “best” items and a shorter version of these 4 judgment tests was constructed, creating a combined test from the "best" items from the other tests. We piloted this test and received encouraging results. A final stage of this project will be in motion soon. During this final stage of testing, we will give the combined test, The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF), as well as the KBIT nonverbal IQ test, which will be administered by graduate students from the School Psychology program at OSU. Again, when completed, we hope to use this test to compare the typically-developing age-matched group and the SLI group for differences in verb finiteness and case-marking.Arts and Science Undergraduate Research Scholarship, Social and Behavioral Science Research GrantNo embarg