Case-Marker Errors in Japanese Children with Specific Language Impairment

—Comparison of Error Rates in Spontaneous Speech and an Experimental Task—

Abstract

Japanese children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been reported to have difficulty using case-markers. These findings suggest that case-marker errors can be clinical markers of SLI in Japanese-speaking children. However, few studies have been done on the error rates of case-markers in spontaneous speech or in an experimental task. The purpose of this study was to investigate the error rates of case-markers in spontaneous speech and in an experimental task in Japanese children with SLI. The participants were 9 SLI children (7 boys, 2 girls), all native speakers of Japanese. Their ages ranged from 7; 7 to 11; 3, with a mean age of 9; 5. As spontaneous speech, the utterances of each child in free conversation with their teacher or the first author were gathered and analyzed. As an experimental task, a sentence completion task was used. Each stimulus sentence had two blanks which had to be filled in with the corresponding case-marker. The results were as follows. The percent of case-marker errors in the 9 SLI children was 1.5% in spontaneous speech, against 53.1% in the experimental task. The difference was thus significant. These findings suggest that we need to examine not only data on spontaneous speech but also results of an experimental task in order to identify Japanese children with SLI.