Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-5wvtr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T21:27:01.492Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Inflectional morphology in a family with inherited specific language impairment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1999

Michael T. Ullman  and
Myrna Gopnik
Michael T. Ullman*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
Myrna Gopnik
Affiliation:
McGill University
*
Michael T. Ullman, Georgetown Institute for Cognitive and Computational Science, Research Building, 3970 Reservoir Road, NW, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20007. Email: michael@giccs.georgetown.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The production of regular and irregular past tense forms was investigated among the members of an English-speaking family with a hereditary disorder of language. Unlike the control subjects, the family members affected by the disorder failed to generate overregularizations (e.g., digged) or novel regular forms (plammed, crived), whereas they did produce novel irregularizations (crive–crove). They showed word frequency effects for regular past tense forms (looked) and had trouble producing regulars and irregulars (looked, dug). This pattern cannot be easily explained by deficits of articulation or of perceptual processing, by previous simulations of impairments to a single-mechanism system, or by the extended optional infinitive hypothesis. We argue that the pattern is consistent with a three-level explanation. First, we posit a grammatical deficit of rules or morphological paradigms. This may be caused by a dysfunction of a frontal/basal-ganglia “procedural memory” system previously implicated in the implicit learning and use of motor and cognitive skills. Second, in contexts requiring inflection in the normal adult grammar, the affected subjects appear to retrieve word forms as a function of their accessibility and conceptual appropriateness (“conceptual selection”). Their acquisition and use of these word forms may rely on a “declarative memory” system previously implicated in the explicit learning and use of facts and events. Third, a compensatory strategy may be at work. Some family members may have explicitly learned a strategy of adding suffix-like endings to forms retrieved by conceptual selection. The morphological errors of young normal children appear to be similar to those of the affected family members, who may have been left stranded with conceptual selection by a specific developmental arrest. The same underlying deficit may also explain the impaired subjects' difficulties with derivational morphology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 51 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, C., & Bishop, D. V. M. (1989). Conversational characteristics of children with semanticpragmatic disorder. British Journal of Disorders of Communication, 24, 211–240.Google Scholar
Barsalou, L. W. (1985). Ideals, central tendency, and frequency of instantiation as determinants of graded structure in categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 11, 629–654.Google Scholar
Bellugi, U., Wang, P. P., & Jernigan, T. L. (1994). Williams syndrome: An unusual neuropsychological profile. In Broman, S. H. & Grafman, J. (Eds.), Atypical cognitive deficits in developmental disorders: Implications for brain functions (pp. 24–56). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bishop, D. V. M. (1992). The underlying nature of specific language impairment. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 33, 3–66.Google Scholar
Bromberg, H., Ullman, M. T., Coppola, M., Marcus, G., Kelly, K., & Levine, K. (1994). A dissociation of memory and grammar: Evidence from Williams syndrome. Paper presented at the 18th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). Development of the first language in the human species. American Psychologist, 28(2), 97–161.Google Scholar
Buckner, R. L., & Tulving, E. (1995). Neuroimaging studies of memory: Theory and recent PET results. In Boller, F. & Grafman, J. (Eds.), Handbook of neuropsychology (Vol. 10, pp. 439–466). New York: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. L., & Moder, C. L. (1983). Morphological classes as natural categories. Language, 59, 251–270.Google Scholar
Cappa, S., & Ullman, M. T. (1998). A neural dissociation in Italian verbal morphology. Paper presented at the 5th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA.Google Scholar
Carstairs, A. (1987). Allomorphy in inflexion. London: Croon Helm.Google Scholar
Cazden, C. B. (1968). The acquisition of noun and verb inflections. Child Development, 39, 433–448.Google Scholar
Church, K. (1988). A stochastic parts program and noun phrase parser for unrestricted text. Paper presented at the Second Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, Austin, Texas.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H. (1989). The grammatical characterization of developmental dysphasia. Linguistics, 27, 897–920.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cottrell, G. W., & Plunkett, K. (1991). Learning the past tense in a recurrent network: Acquiring the mapping from meaning to sounds. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 328–333). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Crago, M., & Allen, S. (1994). Building the case for impairment in linguistic representation: Inuktitut data. The McGill working papers in linguistics: Linguistic aspects of familial language impairment (Vol. 10, pp. 206–215). Montreal: McGill University Press.Google Scholar
Dalalakis, J. (1994). Familial language impairment in Greek. The McGill working papers in linguistics: Linguistic aspects of familial language impairment (Vol. 10, pp. 216–227). Montreal: McGill University Press.Google Scholar
Daugherty, K., & Seidenberg, M. (1992). Rules or connections? The past tense revisited. Paper presented at the Milwaukee Rules Conference, Milwaukee, WI.Google Scholar
Dromi, E., Leonard, L., & Shtieman, M. (1993). The grammatical morphology of Hebrew-speaking children with specific language impairment: Some competing hypotheses. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 36, 760–771.Google Scholar
Dubois, B., Boller, F., Pillon, B., & Agid, Y. (1991). Cognitive deficits in Parkinson's disease. In Boller, F. & Grafman, J. (Eds.), Handbook of neuropsychology (Vol. 5, pp. 195–240). Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., & Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Fee, E. J. ((1995). The phonological system of a specifically language-impaired population. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 9, 189–209.Google Scholar
Francis, N., & Kucera, H. (1982). Frequency analysis of English usage: Lexicon and grammar. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Fukuda, S., & Fukuda, S. E. (1994). Familial language impairment in Japanese: A linguistic investigation. The McGill working papers in linguistics: Linguistic aspects of familial language impairment (Vol. 10, pp. 150–177). Montreal: McGill University Press.Google Scholar
Fukuda, S., & Gopnik, M. (1994). What is familial language impairment? Gengo, 23(4), 42–49.Google Scholar
Gillon, B., & Gopnik, M. (1994). Grammatical number in subjects with genetic language impairment. The McGill working papers in linguistics: Linguistic aspects of familial language impairment (Vol. 10, pp. 41–49). Montreal: McGill University Press.Google Scholar
Goad, H., & Rebellati, C. (1994). Pluralization in familial language impairment: Affixation or compounding? The McGill working papers in linguistics: Linguistic aspects of familial language impairment (Vol. 10, pp. 24–40). Montreal: McGill University Press.Google Scholar
Goodglass, H. (1993). Understanding aphasia. San Diego, CA: Academic.Google Scholar
Gopnik, M. (1990a). Feature-blind grammar and dysphasia. Nature, 344, 715.Google Scholar
Gopnik, M. (1990b). Feature blindness: A case study. Language Acquisition, 1, 139–164.Google Scholar
Gopnik, M. (1994a). The articulatory hypothesis: Production of final alveolars in monomorphemic words. The McGill working papers in linguistics: Linguistic aspects of familial language impairment (Vol. 10, pp. 129–134). Montreal: McGill University Press.Google Scholar
Gopnik, M. (1994b). The auditory perception/processing hypothesis revisited. The McGill working papers in linguistics: Linguistic aspects of familial language impairment (Vol. 10, pp. 135–141). Montreal: McGill University Press.Google Scholar
Gopnik, M. (1994c). The family. The McGill working papers in linguistics: Linguistic aspects of familial language impairment (Vol. 10, pp. 1–4). Montreal: McGill University Press.Google Scholar
Gopnik, M. (1994d). Impairments of tense in a familial language disorder. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 8, 109–133.Google Scholar
Gopnik, M., & Crago, M. B. (1991). Familial aggregation of a developmental language disorder. Cognition, 39, 1–50.Google Scholar
Gopnik, M., Dalalakis, J., Fukuda, S. E., Fukuda, S., & Kehayia, E. (1996). Genetic language impairment: Unruly grammars. Proceedings of the British Academy of Sciences, 88, 223–249.Google Scholar
Graybiel, A. M. (1995). Building action repertoires: Memory and learning functions of the basal ganglia. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 5, 733–741.Google Scholar
Hare, M., Elman, J. L., & Daugherty, K. G. (1995). Default generalisation in connectionist networks. Language and Cognitive Processes, 10, 601–630.Google Scholar
Heilman, K. M., & Rothi, L. J. G. (1993). Apraxia. In Heilman, K. M. & Valenstein, E. (Eds.), Clinical neuropsychology (3rd ed., pp. 141–163). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Heilman, K. M., Watson, R. T., & Rothi, L. G. (1997). Disorders of skilled movement: Limb apraxia. In Feinberg, T. E. & Farah, M. (Eds.), Behavioral neurology and neuropsychology (pp. 227–235). New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Hoeffner, J. H. (1992). Are rules a thing of the past? The acquisition of verbal morphology by an attractor network. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 861–866). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Hoeffner, J. H., & McClelland, J. L. (1993). Can a perceptual processing deficit explain the impairment of inflectional morphology in development dysphasia? A computational investigation. In Clark, E.(Ed.), Proceedings of the 25th Annual Child Language Research Forum (pp. 38–49).Google Scholar
Hurst, J. A., Baraister, M., Auger, E., Graham, F., & Norell, S. (1990). An extended family with a dominantly inherited speech disorder. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 32, 352–355.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. S. (1990). Semantic structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jaeger, J. J., Lockwood, A. H., Kemmerer, D. L., Van Valin, J., Robert, D., Murphy, B. W., & Khalak, H. G. (1996). A PET study of English verb morphology. Language, 2, 451–497.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D., & Miller, D. T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychology Review, 93, 136–153.Google Scholar
Kim, J. J., Pinker, S., Prince, A., & Prasada, S. (1991). Why no mere mortal has ever flown out to center field. Cognitive Science, 15, 173–218.Google Scholar
Knowlton, B. J., Mangels, J. A., & Squire, L. R. (1996). A neostriatal habit learning system in humans. Science, 273, 1399–1402.Google Scholar
Kosslyn, S. M. (1994). Image and brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kucera, H., & Francis, N. (1967). Computational analysis of present-day American English. Providence, RI: Brown University Press.Google Scholar
Leonard, L., Bortolini, U., Caselli, M., McGregor, K., & Sabbadini, L. (1992). Morphological deficits in children with specific language impairment: The status of features in the underlying grammar. Language Acquisition, 2, 151–179.Google Scholar
Leonard, L., McGregor, K., & Allen, G. (1992). Grammatical morphology and speech perception in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 35, 1076–1085.Google Scholar
Leonard, L. B. (1989). Language learnability and specific language impairment in children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10, 179–202.Google Scholar
Leonard, L. B. (1998). Children with specific language impairment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B., & Leinbach, J. (1991). Implementations are not conceptualizations: Revising the verb learning model. Cognition, 40, 121–157.Google Scholar
Marchman, V. A. (1993). Constraints on plasticity in a connectionist model of the English past tense. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 5, 215–234.Google Scholar
Marchman, V. A., & Weismer, S. E. (1994). Patterns of productivity in children with SLI and NL: A study of the English past tense. Poster presented to the Society for Research in Child Language Disorders (SRCLD), Madison, WI.Google Scholar
Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). German inflection: The exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 189–256.Google Scholar
Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., & Xu, F. (1992). Overrregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57 (4, Serial No. 228), 1–165.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1997). Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature, 387, 592–594.Google Scholar
Matthews, J. (Ed.). (1994). The McGill working papers in linguistics: Linguistic aspects of familial language impairment (Vol. 10). Montreal: McGill University Press.Google Scholar
Menyuk, P. (1964). Comparison of grammar of children with functionally deviant and normal speech. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 7, 109–121.Google Scholar
Mervis, C. B., & Johnson, K. (1991). Acquisition of the plural morpheme: A case study. Developmental Psychology, 27, 222–235.Google Scholar
Mishkin, M., Malamut, B., & Bachevalier, J. (1984). Memories and habits: Two neural systems. In Lynch, G., McGaugh, J. L., & Weinburger, N. W. (Eds.), Neurobiology of learning and memory (pp. 65–77). New York: Guilford.Google Scholar
Newman, A., Neville, H., & Ullman, M. T. (1998). Neural processing of inflectional morphology: An event-related potential study of English past tense. Paper presented at the 5th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco.Google Scholar
Oetting, J. B., & Horohov, J. E. (1997). Past tense marking by children with and without specific language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 40, 62–74.Google Scholar
Oetting, J. B., & Rice, M. (1993). Plural acquisition in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 36, 1236–1248.Google Scholar
Paradis, M., & Gopnik, M. (1994). Compensatory strategies in familial language impairment. The McGill working papers in linguistics: Linguistic aspects of familial language impairment (Vol. 10, pp. 142–149). Montreal: McGill University Press.Google Scholar
Pembrey, M. (1992). Genetics and language disorder. In Fletcher, P. & Hall, D. (Eds.), Specific speech and language disorder in children: Correlates, characteristics, and outcomes (pp. 51–62). San Diego: Singular Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Penke, M., Weyerts, H., Gross, M., Zander, E., Münte, T. F., & Clahsen, H. (1997). How the brain processes complex words: An ERP-study of German verb inflections. Essex research reports in Linguistics, 14, 1–41.Google Scholar
Perlman, G. (1986). Unixstat.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development (Vol. 7). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1991). Rules, of language. Science, 253, 530–535.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York: William Morrow.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., & Prince, A. (1988). On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition, 28, 73–193.Google Scholar
Plunkett, K., & Marchman, V. (1991). U-Shaped learning and frequency effects in a multi-layered perceptron: Implications for child language acquisition. Cognition, 38, 43–102.Google Scholar
Plunkett, K., & Marchman, V. (1993). From rote learning to system building: Acquiring verb morphology in children and connectionist nets. Cognition, 48, 21–69.Google Scholar
Prasada, S., & Pinker, S. (1993). Generalisation of regular and irregular morphological patterns. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8, 1–56.Google Scholar
Prasada, S., Pinker, S., & Snyder, W. (1990). Some evidence that irregular forms are retrieved from memory but regular forms are rule-generated. Paper presented at the 31st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, New Orleans, LA.Google Scholar
Rice, M. L., Wexler, K., & Cleave, P. L. (1995). Specific language impairment as a period of extended optional infinitive. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38, 850–863.Google Scholar
Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In Rosch, E. & Lloyd, B. B. (Eds.), Cognition and categorization (pp. 27–48). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Rumelhart, D. E., & McClelland, J. L. (1986). On learning the past tenses of English verbs. In McClelland, J. L., Rumelhart, D. E., & PDP Research Group (Eds.), Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition (Vol. 2, pp. 216–271). Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.Google Scholar
Seidenberg, M. S., & Daugherty, K. G. (1992). The psychological reality of grammatical rules: Linguistic, historical, chronometric, psychophysical, computational, developmental, neurological, and genetic evidence–NOT!!! Paper presented at the Reality of Linguistic Rules Conference, Milwaukee, WI.Google Scholar
Seidenberg, M. S., & Hoeffner, J. H. (in press). Evaluating behavioral and neuroimaging data on past tense production. Language, 74, 104–122.Google Scholar
Shimamura, A. P. (1995). Memory and frontal lobe function. In Gazzaniga, M. S. (Ed.), The cognitive neurosciences (pp. 803–813). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Smith, E., & Medin, D. L. (1981). Categories and concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Spencer, A. (1991). Morphological theory. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Squire, L. R., Knowlton, B., & Musen, G. (1993). The structure and organization of memory. Annual Review of Psychology, 44, 453–495.Google Scholar
Stemberger, J., & MacWhinney, B. (1988). Are inflected forms stored in the lexicon? In Hammond, M. & Noonan, M. (Eds.), Theoretical morphology: Approached in modern linguistics (pp. 101–116). New York: Academic.Google Scholar
Tallal, P., Piercy, M. (1973). Defects of nonverbal auditory perception in children with developmental dysphasia. Nature, 241, 468–469.Google Scholar
Tallal, P., Stark, R., Kallman, C., & Mellits, D. (1980). Developmental dysphasia: The relation between acoustic processing deficits and verbal processing. Neuropsychologia, 18, 273–284.Google Scholar
Tallal, P., Stark, R., & Mellits, D. (1985). The relationship between auditory temporal analysis and receptive language development: Evidence from studies. Neuropsychologia, 23, 527–534.Google Scholar
Tukey, J. W. (1977). Exploratory data analysis. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review, 84, 327–352.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T. (1993). The computation of inflectional morphology. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T. (1999). Acceptability ratings of regular and irregular past tense forms: Evidence for a dual-system model of language from word frequency and phonological similarity effects. Language and Cognitive Processes, 14, 47–67.Google Scholar
(in press). Evidence that lexical memory is part of the temporal lobe declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the frontal/basal-ganglia procedural system. Brain and Language.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T., Bergida, R., & O’Craven, K. (1997). Distinct fMRI activation patterns for regular and irregular past tense. NeuroImage,, 5, S549.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T., Corkin, S., Coppola, M., Hickok, G., Growdon, J. H., Koroshetz, W. J., & Pinker, S. (1997). A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 266–276.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T., Corkin, S., Pinker, S., Coppola, M., Locascio, J., & Growdon, J. (1993). Neural modularity in language: Evidence from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts, 19, 1806.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T., Corkin, S., Pinker, S., Coppola, M., Locascio, J., & Growdon, J. (1994). The neural structures subserving language: Evidence from inflectional morphology. Paper presented at the 1st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T., Izvorski, R., Love, T., Yee, E., Swinney, D., Hickok, G. (in press). A double dissociation from aphasia: Words linked to left posterior regions, rules to left frontal regions. Brain and Language.Google Scholar
van der Lely, H. K. J. (1996a). Empirical evidence for the modularity of language from grammatical SLI children. Proceedings from the 20th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
van der Lely, H. K. J. (1996b). Language modularity and grammatically specific language impaired children. In Aldridge, M. (Ed.), Child language (pp. 188–201). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
van der Lely, H. K. J., & Stollwerck, L. (1997). Binding theory and specifically language impaired children. Cognition, 62, 245–290.Google Scholar
van der Lely, H. K. J., & Ullman, M. T. (1996). The computation and representation of past-tense morphology in specifically language impaired and normally developing children. Proceedings of the 20th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 804–815).Google Scholar
(submitted). Past tense morphology in specifically language impaired and normally developing children.Google Scholar
Vargha-Khadem, F., Watkins, K., Alcock, K., Fletcher, P., & Passingham, R. (1995). Praxic and nonverbal cognitive deficits in a large family with genetically transmitted speech and language disorder. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA,, 92, 930–933.Google Scholar
Watkins, K. E., Passingham, R. E., Vargha-Khadem, F., Ashburner, J., Friston, K. J., Connelly, A., & Gadian, D. G. (1997). Bilateral abnormalities of the caudate in a family with an inherited speech and language disorder. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts, 23, 2228.Google Scholar
Wechsler, D. (1974). Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Revised. New York: Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar
Wechsler, D. (1981). Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Revised. New York: Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar
Weyerts, H., Penke, M., Dohrn, U., Clahsen, H., & Münte, T. F. (1996). Brain potentials indicate differences between regular and irregular German noun plurals. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics, 13, 54–67.Google Scholar
Willingham, D. B. (in press). COBALT: A neuropsychological theory of motor skill learning., Psychological Review.Google Scholar
Xu, F., & Pinker, S. (1995). Weird past tense forms. Journal of Child Language, 22, 531–556.Google Scholar
Young, A. B., & Penney, J. B. (1993). Biochemical and functional organization of the basal ganglia. In Jankovic, J. & Tolosa, E. (Eds.), Parkinson's disease and movement disorders (2nd ed., pp. 1–11). Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins.Google Scholar