2021 Volume 62 Issue 1 Pages 39-45
This study aimed to investigate the linguistic knowledge of Japanese children with specific language impairment (SLI) concerning nominative, accusative and dative cases, as well as their compensatory strategy in more detail by conducting a sentence-completion task consisting of just one blank. The participants were 7 children with SLI from third to fifth grade of elementary school and 25 children with typical development in third grade. The results showed that the number of mean correct sentences was significantly lower for children with SLI than that for typically developing children, except in the case of passive canonical word-ordered sentences. Additionally, for children with SLI, the accuracy of non-canonical word-ordered sentences was significantly lower than that of canonical word-ordered sentences. While children with SLI inserted ga in the blank correctly, they tended to overuse ni in place of o incorrectly. These findings suggested that although children with SLI did not acquire sufficient linguistic knowledge of case assignment as typically developing children, their knowledge of the nominative case was more precise than that of the accusative or dative case. Furthermore, the findings also suggested that ni was used as a default to avoid violation of the principle concerning case assignment, or as a kind of strategy to compensate for their insufficient linguistic knowledge of case assignment.
