Specific Language Impairment in Japanese : A Linguistic Investigation

概要

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Gopnik (1992, 1994) and Gopnik, Dalalakis, Fukuda and Fukuda (1997) attribute the linguistic deficits characteristic of a specifically language-impaired English (SLI) familial aggregation to an impairment in the underlying grammar-more specifically, to an inability to construct implicit morphological rules that govern inflectional properties. This paper evaluates this hypothesis with preliminary empirical data from Japanese SLI individuals. If the impairment were one of the underlying grammar, its linguistic manifestations should be similar across diverse languages. A series of linguistically principled tests - tasks of syntactic comprehension (SC), grammaticality judgement (GJ), and tense-marking production-was administered to 8 SLI children, ranging in age from 8;9 to 12;1, 3 of whom had a positive family history of language impairment, and to 8 age-matched non-SLI children. A significant difference between the groups' performance levels was found. The data indicate that the manifestations in Japanese do, in fact, resemble those in English. Thus, the results from this study provide further empirical support for the linguistic hypothesis and suggest that some cases of SLI are genetic in origin.
名古屋商科大学の論文