Structural and Lexical Case in Child German: Evidence from language-impaired and typically-developing children

This study examines the system of case marking in two groups of German-speaking children, five children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and five typically-developing (TD) children matched to the SLI children on a general measure of language development. The data from both groups demonstrate high accuracy scores for structural case marking and overapplications of structural cases to instances that require lexical case marking in the adult language. These results, we argue, provide evidence for the sensitivity of both TD and SLI children for abstract, structure-based regularities, and is incompatible with accounts of SLI that posit broad syntactic deficits for these children.