engleski

Neologisms and morphological errors in the discourse of children with SLI

The notion of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) refers to children whose language skills are disproportionately weaker regarding their chronological age and their non-verbal skills, for unknown reasons and concerning any part of their linguistic development (Bishop, Adams 1991; Cole et al. 1990). Neologisms are newly forged and still not accepted words, which enter the language in different ways. They are often made according to already existing patterns, but they are sometimes pure inventions or loans from other languages. Children with SLI can suffer from disorders in their phonological, semantic, grammatical and pragmatic language development, yet the morphosyntactic level is considered as the most affected one. Morphology as a language element is especially important in assessment of someone's language competence, because it reflects in a best way the grammaticality of some language system. We have analysed speech samples of 33 children with SLI of both sexes, in order to establish the frequency of neologisms, as well as the number and characteristics of morphological errors, which occur with children suffering from SLI.

SLI; neologisms; morphological errors; linguistic development

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