Morpheme Use in Late Talkers at Age 5
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2013
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
It has been widely observed that some children struggle to acquire language. Of particular
interest to the current study is the subset of children who, although developmentally typical in
every other domain, fail to begin talking at the expected age and are slow to acquire words.
These children, termed "late talkers" (Rescorla, 2000), were previously thought to 'catch up' to
their non-delayed peers. However, more recent evidence suggests that late talkers show mild but
consistent language weakness through late adolescence, long after they have acquired vocabulary
and grammar. The present study fills a gap in the literature on these late talkers' developmental
trajectory by examining morphological development at age 5 in a group of late talkers identified
at 24 to 31 months of age. We found that late talkers and typically developing children showed
no significant differences in morphological mastery at age 5, despite highly significant
differences in MLU and IPSyn performance. This suggests that late talkers' language difficulties
at age 5 may specifically concern issues of sentence structure and complex language use, which
continue to manifest in higher-order language differences through adolescence. These findings
are discussed within Rescorla' s larger body of research, and suggestions for future research and
clinical intervention are provided.