engleski

Language-specific and language-universal traits of SLI in Croatian

An overview of SLI research in Croatian in the last 15 years reveals characteristic traits of language behavior in SLI children concerning phonology, morphosyntax and lexicon. The research was oriented towards defining language-specific characteristics of SLI that depended on known typological traits of Croatian. As Croatian is a morphologically rich language, commission errors are much more frequent than omissions, especially in noun paradigms. Further on, as the number of different paradigms is big (8 verbal 3 nominal macro-classes with different number of classes within each) generalizations across different paradigms are characteristic for language acquisition both in children with typical language development and children with SLI. However, the pattern of generalizations is different with SLI children being less systematic and having more diverse generalizations. This sort of behavioral research provides detailed picture of SLI in Croatian, but says nothing about possible background mechanisms that lie behind language acquisition in the typical and impaired population. Recently, neurocognitive research using event-related potentials has been used in the research of SLI. The initial ERP studies reveal that SLI children lack dissociations (in neuropsychological sense) of various aspects of grammar. This can be interpreted as a difference in the developmental course, which leads to greater specialization and modularization of language function in TLD children, but not in children with SLI. In this study both behavioral and neurocognitive results will be presented and the results obtained in Croatian will be compared to the results obtained in other languages.

SLI; typological traits; ERP

nije evidentirano