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Morphophonology and compensation in Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek.

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Type

Article

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Authors

Mastropavlou, Maria 
Petinou, Kakia 
Tsimpli, Ianthi Maria 
Georgiou, Anastasios M 

Abstract

The current study investigates the role of the morphophonological realisation of grammatical features as a compensatory mechanism for morphosyntactic deficits in specific language impairment (SLI). The phenomenon examined is past tense formation in Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and Cypriot Greek (CG) as it manifests a distinction in morphophonological salience realisation in the two linguistic varieties via differential use of a stress shift and stressed syllabic augment [é] required for past tense rule formation. Participants were pre-schoolers with typical language development (TD) and children with SLI. Subjects produced real verb (RV) and pseudo-verb stimuli (PV) in sentence completion tasks. Results indicated that morphophonological properties of past tense formation affected SLI but not TD performance. We attribute the results to the difference in the status of the augment in each variety and the effects it has on its realisation at the phonetic interface. Furthermore, verb contractibility appeared to pose particular difficulties in the performance of all groups.

Description

Keywords

Cross-linguistic SLI, Cypriot SLI, Greek SLI, compensation, morphophonological salience, past tense, Child Language, Child, Preschool, Female, Greece, Humans, Male, Phonetics, Specific Language Disorder

Journal Title

Clin Linguist Phon

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0269-9206
1464-5076

Volume Title

33

Publisher

Informa UK Limited
Sponsorship
Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation GRCY/04406/17