Comprehension of Definite and Indefinite Articles in Children with Sli

INTRODUCTION Recent research on the language of children of SLI shows a marked delay in their acquisition of grammatical morphemes, especially those associated with the verbal system (e.g., Rice and Oetting, 1993; Rice, Wexler and Cleaver, 1996). In English, the nominal system is morphologically poorer than the verbal system, which may account for the discrepancy observed in the two systems of children with SLI. Researchers of SLI in other languages have found that there are deficits in the nominal system as well, for example children with SLI learning German show difficulty using gender agreement and case marking on articles and nouns (e.g., Clahsen, 1989). English articles are not inflected, but children with SLI often omit articles in their spontaneous language productions (Leonard, 1995).