GRAMMATICAL DISABILITY

Faculty: Dr. Brajesh Priyadarshi

Presenters: Krishnaveni Rajeev, Noneet Walia, Dikshitha Anand

Introduction:
 For most linguists, grammar consists of two main areas of study: morphology and
syntax. Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. This structure may
be simple and consist of a single morpheme.
 Such monomorphemic words include ‘neighbour’ and ‘crocodile’. (The reader will
note that monomorphemic is not the same as monosyllabic.) It is frequently the case,
however, that words consist of two or more morphemes. These polymerphemic words
– examples include ‘cats’ and ‘navigator’ – contain bound and free morphemes.
 A free morpheme can stand independently of other morphemes as a word of the
language. (In the example ‘cats’, cat is a free morpheme.) Bound morphemes, as their
name suggests, have no independent existence as words of the language. (In the
example -s and -or are bound morphemes.)
 These morphemes can inflect to express grammatical contrasts. The -s suffix of ‘cats’
is an inflectional morpheme, as it signals a grammatical distinction between singular
and plural. Other bound morphemes are involved in the construction of new words
and do not express grammatical contrasts. The -or suffix of ‘navigator’ is such a
derivational morpheme.
 Syntax is the study of the internal structure of sentences. At its most basic, this
structure consists of words that are nouns (‘man’), verbs (‘sing’), adjectives (‘blue’),
adverbs (‘quickly’), prepositions (‘beside’), articles (‘the’) and so on.
 These words come together to form phrases, some of which exhibit extensive pre-
and post modification. For example, the patient and the difficult patient in the waiting
room are both noun phrases.
 However, the complexity of the second noun phrase derives from the presence of a
premodifying adjective (‘difficult’) and a postmodifying prepositional phrase (‘in the
waiting room’).
 Phrases combine to form sentences or clauses within sentences. The combination of
the noun phrase the man and the verb phrase walks in the park results in the simple
sentence The man walks in the park.
 However, this latter construction may exist as a clause within a larger sentence
(Although the man walks in the park, he is still very overweight), the parts of which
are linked by a conjunction (in this case, the subordinating conjunction ‘although’).
So, Grammar refers to a level of structural organization in language that can be studied
independently of phonology and semantics and is generally divided into the branches of
syntax and morphology. In this sense, it could be loosely defined as the study of the way
words, and their components, combine to form sentences and sentence sequences.
Grammatical disabilities are defined as non-fluent production characterized by a high
omission rate of function words, low use of subordination, and general use of short sentences.
Research in syntactic processing or parsing investigates the mental processes involved
when we comprehend sentences in real time, and the way different types of information are
utilized to build up the grammatical structure of the sentence, and thus sentence
interpretation.
The indispensability of syntax, is evident in the outline of most linguistic theories, which
generally recognize three distinct aspects or levels in the study of language. These levels can
be represented in the following way:

In remedial education, the traditional focus has been on vocabulary enrichment, and semantic
considerations generally; and the same applies to primary education as a whole, where studies
of the reading process, for example, have concentrated on the two sides of the diagram above,
ignoring the centre.

Misplaced emphasis:
1. The focus on “parts of speech”
2. The focus on length
3. Linguistic realism
4. Selective commentary

Levels of Grammatical Disability:

Grammatical disorder is not viewed as a single homogenous phenomenon.

It happens at four main levels at each of which a type of grammatical difficulty can be
located:
1. Connectivity

The lady was late and her car broke down because she repaired it.
The car broke down because the lady was late and she repaired it .

2. Clause difficulties
The lady and because her car and she it (verb omission)
The lady late because broke the car and she repaired it (element order)
Was late because broke down and repaired it (subject omission)
3. Phrase difficulties

Lady late because car broke and she repaired (no phrase development)
Lady the late because car broke down her and repaired it she (word order in phrase)

4. Word difficulties

The lady late because her car break and she repair it (in inflections)
The lady lateing because her car broked and she repairs it (wrong inflections)
The Ambiguity of Grammatical Error:

It is not difficult to isolate instances of grammatical disability that are unaffected by semantic
factors, e.g. a straightforward failure to use the correct word order, or to make a verb agree
with its subject, where it is plain that child knows what he means to say and is fully in
command of the vocabulary involved.
When a patient makes a grammatical error in his speech, it is traditional clinical practice to
isolate the error and assign it to a category, such as ‘omission of the article’, ‘word order
inverted’ or ‘wrong form of the pronoun’. Sometimes, this is an easy and unambiguous
process: a child who says, “Him is working” is presumably doing no more than using the
wrong form of the pronoun.
However, the vast majority of patient errors are not like this. The isolation of the error poses
no problem, but its identification does (i.e. what was the intention behind the utterance)
For example, the following sentence was written by a partially hearing child:
Mr. Smith's dinner time four o'clock.
There is evidently something wrong with this sentence-but what, exactly? It could mean any
of the following:
Mr. Smith's dinner time was at four o'clock.
It is Mr. Smith's dinner time at four o'clock.
Mr. Smith's dinner time was four o'clock.
The more deviant the sentence becomes, the wider the range of possible interpretations which
might underlie it. How many errors should be identified in the following sentences, and
where should they be located?
- the car wouldn't go can is was muddy
- he wore blue and star
It might then be that in due course, as more examples of the error range accumulate, it would
be possible to draw some conclusions as to what is happening. For example, if error 1 can be
referred to three possible explanations (A, B, C), and error 2 to three possible explanations
(A, C, D), and error 3 to three possible explanations (A, B, E), then the fact that explanation
A is repeatedly turning up will very likely have some significance. We could then determine
the remedial goal once the error pattern is identified.
Causes of Grammatical disability:

- Sensory limitations such as hearing problem

- Perceptual difficulties such as learning disability
- Limited exposure to correct models
- Traumatic lesion or a stroke

Assessment of Grammatical Disabilities

Assessment of Sentence Comprehension

It is normal to begin syntactic analysis with the Sentence. 6 There are three main tasks: (a) to
identify the sentences in the data; (b) to analyse their structure and function; and (c) to
analyse the way they combine into 'connected speech'.
• Sentence to picture matching tasks:

Here the person hears or reads a sentence and has to match it to one of a number of pictures,
with distracters bearing various relationships to the target. Tasks can explore a range of
structures and different types of predicate; for example, see examples in the VAST
(Bastiaanse et al., 2002) and PALPA (Kay et al., 1992)
• Grammaticality judgment:
In which the person is asked to judge whether heard sentences are syntactically correct or
not. Stimuli can violate a range of syntactic rules, such as constituent order (“pours the water
the man”) and the use of auxiliaries (“is the boy is having a good time”)
• Tests of verb knowledge:
 Can employ a variety of formats, including verb-to-picture matching, odd-one-out tasks, or
matching verbs to video scenes of events (e.g., see examples in Byng, 1988; Marshall et al.,
1993, 1996, 1997; Breedin et al., 1994). Such tasks can be used to explore different
dimensions of verb meaning, particularly with respect to grammatical relevance

Assessment of Sentence Production

• Conversation Analysis (refer- Ball et al., 2008): is in the first instance a procedure for the
analysis of social activities and in particular the use of talk within social activities, and can be
used to investigate various features of those activities including the participants’ deployment
of grammar, lexis and phonology as interactional resources (e.g. Ford, Fox, & Thompson,
2002)
• Picture description tasks: for example, to elicit different verb argument structures (e.g.,
Marshall, Chiat, &Pring, 1997) or active and passive sentences (e.g., Mitchum, Haendiges, &
Berndt, 1995; Thompson & Lee, 2009).
• The Verb and Sentence Test (VAST) (Bastiaanse, Edwards, &Rispins, 2002) includes a
picture description task that targets different verb and sentence types.
• Linguistic Profile test (LPT) (Karanth, 1980): It is an eminent test of morphosyntactic (and
semantic) abilities in the Indian scenario. With the test we can obtain specific Syntactic
reception and expression scores, along with other scores. Originally designed in Kannada, the
test is now available in 7 Indian languages (Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Odiya, Tamil
and Kannada). Limitations of the test are that it can only be used for children between the age
range of 3 to 7 years and it may be of limited use in case the child is nonverbal.

LARSP (Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure)

(Crystal, Fletcher and Garman, 1976)

It is sometimes characterized as a grammatical analysis. Working through procedures such as
LARSP may sometimes indicate a solution to an assessment or remediation problem, but
more usually their main role is to sensitize the clinician to the existence of a problem, and to
make suggestions as to its more precise definition. For a full assessment, it is recommended
that a sample of approximately 30 minutes' duration be obtained of an unstructured teacher-
pupil interaction, using whatever stimuli are felt likely to facilitate a free conversation (e.g.
toys, pictures, magazines, questions about pastimes).
It has seven stages (Crystal et al, 1989):
i. Sampling
ii. Transcription
iii. Grammatical analysis.
iv. Structure count
v. Pattern evaluation
vi. Statement of remedial goals
vii. Statement of remedial procedures.

It is summarized in the form of a single-page profile chart, on which the various patterns of
grammatical strength and weakness in a clinical sample can be plotted.

Intervention: The main motivation for using profiles like LARSP is to develop a
linguistically principled approach to remediation--to provide sound reasons for therapeutic
decision-making. However, it is impossible to implement the findings of a grammatical
profile without carrying out some degree of semantic analysis first. PRISM (Profile in
Semantics) provides one kind of semantic information not available on the LARSP chart,
however it is beyond the scope of this topic (the interested reader is referred to Profiling
Linguistic disability, Crystal)

Grammatical Disability in Disorders:

1)Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

SLI is defined as a delay or a disorder of the normal acquisition of grammar in the
absence of neurological trauma, cognitive impairment, psycho-emotional disturbance, or
motorarticulatory disorders (Leonard, 1998; Levy & Kavé, 1999; Clahsen, 1999). The
weakest developmental area in these children is language itself. Children with SLI, who
have particular abnormalities in Broca’s area, have a wide range of syntactic impairments
in both speech and comprehension. There are also abnormalities associated with basal
ganglia (Fasold & Connor-Linton, 2014).
During the preschool and kindergarten years, morphosyntax is an especially weak area,
and, as these children gradually gain sufficient ability to participate in multiutterance
conversational turns, narrative skills, too, prove to be an area of extraordinary weakness.
The details of the special difficulties differ according to the type of language being
acquired (Bavin, 2012).
Here, we highlight the salient characteristics of SLI in English.
 Deficits in argument structure (Grela 2003, Thordardottir & Ellis Weismer 2002)
 Problems with wh-questions and complement clauses (Owen & Leonard 2006,
Schuele & Dykes 2005, van der Lely & Battel 2003)
 Difficulties with group negotiations and other conversational skills (e.g. Brinton et
al. 1998, Liiva & Cleave 2005)
 Narrative skills (e.g. Dodwell & Bavin in press, Merritt & Liles 1987) and related
skills such as inferencing (e.g. Ellis Weismer 1985, Norbury & Bishop 2002) also
represent a weakness
 Deficits in the use of grammatical morphemes that mark tense and agreement.
These include the third-person singular -s and past tense -ed inflections and the
copula and auxiliary forms of be.
 Morphologic problems are especially marked in these children and they may
never learn to use some of them without intervention (Hegde, 2006). Children
with SLI make less use of these morphemes than do younger typically developing
children matched for mean length of utterance (MLU) or some other language
measure (e.g. Cleave & Rice 1997, Leonard et al. 1997, Marshall & van der Lely
2006, Oetting & Horohov 1997).
 These morphologic errors include errors in:
 Regular plural morpheme and its allomorphic variations (eg. /s/, /z/, and /ez/
variations)
 Possessive morpheme (eg. mom’s bag)
 Present progressive –ing
 Third person singular (eg. “She eat cake” for “She eats cake”)
 Various forms of auxiliary (eg. “She eating cake” for “She is eating cake”)
 Various forms of copula (eg. “Daddy tall” for “Daddy is tall”)
 Tense inflections (eg. –ed, -t, and /d/)
 Irregular plural forms (eg. “sheeps” for “sheep”)
 Irregular past tense verb forms (eg. “goed” for “went”)
 Confusion between singular and plural forms
 Confusion between singular and plural forms of auxiliary and copula (eg. is/are,
was/were)
 Subject case markers (eg. “Her pretty!)
These limitations are explained using three theories:
I. INPUT PROCESSING THEORY (Leonard, 1998) This theory says that
children with SLI have a general processing capacity limitation or reduced speed
of processing, specific difficulty with the perception and production of surface
 features of specific morphemes. Eg: third person singular –s and past tense –ed
inflections
II. GRAMMAR SPECIFIC THEORY (Van der Lely & Christian, 2000) It states
that these children show persisting grammatical impairment in the language
comprehension and production in the absence of any other deficits which is
because of the localized deficits in the representation of the grammatical
morphemes.
III. EXTENDED OPTIONAL INFINITIVE (Rice & Wexler, 2000) It states that
children with SLI develop similar to typical children but only difference is that
children with SLI tend to make tenses as optional and take more time to develop
and use those while actually it should be achieved by 4.6 years.

2) Autism spectrum disorder

ASD is an umbrella term that encompasses a range of disorders that are characterized by
core impairments in social communication and a restricted repertoire of interests and
behaviours (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
 Structural language skills are extremely variable in ASD. The range of abilities
across all age groups extends from nonverbal to verbose. (Toichi&Kamio, 2003).
 Tager-Flusberg (2006) has argued that there are at least two distinct phenotypes
within ASD: (1) an autism language normal (ALN) phenotype, in which language
form is unimpaired and typical patterns of neuroanatomical asymmetry is
observed, and
 (2) autism language impaired (ALI), in which language form impairment is seen
in association with anomalies in left hemisphere brain structure and function (De
Fossé et al., 2004; Verhoeven et al., 2012).
 Swensen et al. (2007), using a preferential looking paradigm, found that the
understanding of subject–verb–object (SVO) word order preceded the production
of SVO structure in two- and three-year-old children with ASD.
 Relative to phonology and lexical knowledge, deficits in morphosyntax and
grammar are more pronounced for children with ASD in general (Boucher, 2012;
Eigsti et al, 2011) and for those with the ALI (Autism Language Impaired)
phenotype in particular (Tek et al., 2014).
 Omission of grammatical features such as plural inflections(-s) and conjunctions
are seen.
 Linguistic components such as verb endings(-ing-ed), past tense and present
progressive and which require syntactic structure are affected. Because they are
unavailable to understand the underlying meaning of these grammatical structures
such as past tense.
 The basic problem starts due to the fact that they do not understand the facts
underlie the formulation of language.
 Uneven syntactic and morphological development, where some sub-skills are
intact and others are delayed or atypical.
 Impaired sentence comprehension is particularly striking in ALI (Loucas et al.,
2008), although there are very few studies exploring comprehension of particular
syntactic structures (Durrleman et al., 2015; Perovic et al., 2013)
  Linguistic analyses done showed that children with ASD use rule-governed
behaviour, however, they had limited production and comprehension of language.
 Eigsti, Bennetto, &Dadlani, (2007) studied the morpho-syntactic development in
autism i.e, a detailed assessment investigation of syntactic and higher level
discourse abilities in verbal children with autism, aged 5 years.
 Findings indicated:
- Clear language difficulties that go beyond what would be expected based
on developmental level specifically, syntactic delays.
- Impairments in discourse management.
- Increased production of non-meaningful words (jargon)
- Increased production of short and grammatically simple sentences relative
to non-ASD peers.

3)Intellectual Disability
Definition: Intellectual Disability is a condition characterized by significant limitations in
both intellectual functioning and adaptive behaviour that originate before the age of 22.
 Morphosyntactic development is slow and remains largely incomplete in moderate to
severe ID subjects.
 The acquisition of the phrase structure follows a typical developmental sequence,
although at a slower developmental pace. However, once the mean length of utterance
(MLU) is above 3, children with ID tend to use shorter, less complex sentences with
fewer elaborations and relative clauses than do typical peers at the same MLU level
(Abbeduto & Boudreau, 2004). Kamhi and Johnston (1982) measured spontaneous
production of pronouns, noun phrases, verb phrases, and negatives, and found
differences between children with and without intellectual disabilities that were
consistent with their MA differences. Shorter, less complex sentences with fewer
subject elaborations or relative clauses than mental age matched peers developing
typically.
 Although children with ID are capable of learning syntactic rules, they tend to rely on
less mature word order rules and a less mature and simpler method of interpretation.
 The general conclusion drawn in the past was that syntactic functioning in children
with ID shows a developmental lag and that MA is therefore a better predictor of
syntactic performance than chronological age(Rosenberg,1982)
 In young ID children, the production of grammatical words is reduced (i.e. articles,
prepositions, pronoun, conjunctions etc.) which gives their utterance a telegraphic
character.
 In spontaneous speech, children with ID relied on “and” as the only form of clausal
linkage. They also substitute what question for all other kinds of “Wh” questions such
as when, where etc.
4)Down Syndrome
Downs Syndrome is the most common chromosomal cause of intellectual disabilities and
because it can usually be identified from birth, this subgroup is the most studied of all
subgroups of ID (Gerber, 1990).
  Grammatical development varies widely in DS, and can only be partially explained in
terms of IQ differences.
 For individuals whose language development progress beyond the use of two-word
utterances, utterances tend to be shorter in comparison to normally developing
children (as measured by mean length of utterance) and are of lower syntactic
complexity (Mervis et al. 1999).
 The development of syntax in DS has a prolonged developmental span, with increases
in syntactic complexity and utterance length being known to continue throughout
adolescence and into early adulthood (Chapman et al. 2002).
 The older DS children and adolescents more frequently omit free and bound
morphemes when compared to normal children in narrative speech samples.
 Syntactic comprehension is characterized by slowed growth and even decline in late
adolescence (Laws & Gunn, 2004) and is more impaired than overall cognitive ability
and vocabulary size (Martin et al., 2013).
 Expressive syntax presents even greater challenges and can be an earlier indicator of
language difficulties. Children with Down syndrome produce shorter and less
complex sentences and fewer question/negation forms than typically developing peers
matched for nonverbal mental age (Caselli et al., 2008; Price et al., 2008).
 Numerous similarities between Down syndrome and more specific language
impairments have been noted with particular limitations in tense marking (past tense –
ed; third person singular –s) (Caselli et al., 2008; Laws & Bishop, 2004).
On the other hand, individuals with Down syndrome appear to have more pronounced
grammatical deficits relative to other groups with ID of known genetic origin.
Finestack and colleagues (2013) reported that grammar was more severely impaired in Down
syndrome than in fragile X syndrome (FXS) and that differences persist into adolescence and
early adulthood.
Miles et al., (2006) found that the narrative contexts in which wordless picture stories are
used as a scaffolding device allow children and adolescents with Downs Syndrome to
produce more complex syntactic expressions that otherwise would not be possible to access
without the use of such support. This study indeed has some important clinical applications.

5)Aphasia
Aphasic patients have word-finding difficulties, like mis-naming things, or they use
circumlocutions to replace difficult words. According to the standard clinical classification of
aphasic syndromes, we can distinguish two characteristic types of errors of morphosyntax in
aphasia. The first is called agrammatism and the second type is called paraphasias.
Agrammatism:
 The omission of function words in speech production, whereas in comprehension,
agrammatic patients perform in the normal range -Standard clinical classification
 Function words such as articles, auxiliaries, complementisers and bound
morphemes, such as those marking tense and agreement in English are affected.
 It does not affect content words such as nouns, verbs and adjectives.
 Agrammatism is considered to be the characteristic symptom of Broca’s aphasia.
  When a Broca’s aphasic patient was asked to describe a picture of a child stealing
a biscuit, the following was the response acquired “Ah … little boy … cookies,
pass … a … little boy … Tip, up … fall”.  Speech like this is emitted slowly with
great effort (a characteristic we have partially indicated by the pauses between
different parts of the utterance).
 Content words such as adjectives (little), nouns (boy, cookies) and verbs (tip, fall)
are produced by the patient, whereas function words such as articles and bound
morphemes are sometimes omitted.  This combination of properties produces the
characteristic telegraphic speech of Broca’s aphasics, a term which has given way
to ‘agrammatism’ in more recent research.
Paraphasia:
 Errors in the use of content words
 Function words remain unaffected.
 Typically occur in Wernicke’s aphasics
 Performance of Wernicke’s aphasics on content words is affected by the
frequency of the word in the vocabulary: infrequent words take longer to
retrieve and are more often inaccurately retrieved than frequent words.
 When a Wernicke’s aphasic patient was asked to describe a picture of a child
stealing a biscuit, the following was the response acquired- “They have the
cases, the cookies, and they were helping each other with the good”.
 The speech of such patients is fluent and effortless, and the rate of production
of words can exceed the normal rate.
 However, the content of the speech can be remarkably empty and convey little
information, as illustrated by the sequence.
 Typically, Wernicke’s aphasics do not demonstrate disturbances of grammar
and function words, but rather these patients make many errors in content-
word usage, e.g. cases instead of cookies.
 This characteristic of inappropriate content-word selection appears also in
reading aloud. Example, the sentence “The spy fled to Greece” is read as “The
spy filed to grain”
 The following effects have been found in content-word paraphasias from
aphasics:
I. Frequency effects: Low-frequency content words yield more
paraphasias than high-frequency words.
II. Categorisation-level effects: a. Hyponym exchanges: sparrow → owl
b. Use of superordinates: sparrow → bird
III. Similarity effects: a. Semantic exchanges: hair → comb b. Pragmatic
exchanges: flowers → visit (flowers and visits are often associated in
everyday life)
6)Hearing Impairment

With regard to the development of syntax and morphology, studies reported in the 1970’s and
80’s focussed on older hearing-impaired children and identified considerable delay that
varied widely and was generally related to the severity of hearing loss (Davis and Hardick,
1981; Engen and Engen, 1983; Levitt,1987; Quigley 1969; Russel, Power and Quigley,1976).
Some of the morpho-syntactic characteristics reported in the earlier literature are as follows:
 Overuse of nouns and verbs
 Excessive use of simple sentence structure
 Inaccurate use of main verb forms: - Difficulty with past tense markers and third
person singular present tense (“runs”) - Omission of auxiliary verbs - More difficulty
with present perfect (eg, have spoken) and negative passive (eg, the candy was not
found by the girls)
 Omission of function words such as the articles (a, the, and an), prepositions such as
(to, of); demonstrative pronouns (this, that) and conjunctions (and, but).
 Telegraphic characteristics to connected speech.
 Difficulty with noun morphology: - Problems with plural markers such as “two pig”
for “two pigs” - Apply regular rules to irregular plural nouns (“micees”) and to
collective nouns (“sheeps”) - Use irregular plural forms as singular nouns (“The men
was hot”)
 Difficulty understanding medially embedded clause (“The man who has the limp
caught the bus”)
 Likely to interpret sentences based on word order, thereby imposing Subject-
VerbObject rule on complex sentences.
Although many of these patterns can be seen in the language development of young,
normally hearing children, hearing-impaired children were reported to use them for much
longer periods, with many never acquiring adult-level competency. These significant delays
in syntax and morphology were reported as impacting the academic success of the children
because many of the linguistic structures that are most challenging for Hearing Impaired
children are found in the second-grade reading primers (Ross, 1982).
7)Learning Disability
Children with LD may have difficulty with form and content of language. Synthesizing of
language rules seems to be particularly difficult, resulting in delays in morphological rule
acquisition and in the development of syntactic complexity. Some of their Morpho-syntactic
characteristics are:
 Difficulty with negative and passive constructions, relative clauses, contractions and
adjectival forms
 Difficulty with grammatical morphology i.e, one with one root or free morpheme &
one or more prefixes/suffixes or bound morpheme) can potentially impact children’s
literacy acquisition (Green, Hay, Wolter& Wood, 2009).
 Difficulty with verb tense markers, possession and pronouns
 Able to repeat sentences but often in reduced forms, indicating difficulty learning
different sentence forms
 Article confusion (a, an and the)
 Poor command of past tense inflections, wherein most errors occurring with irregular
forms
  Difficulty in acquiring the phonological conditioning rules for the –ez& –ed
variations of the inflectional word endings (noun plurals ending in /iz/, & past tense of
regular verbs ending in /id/)
 Similar errors are seen as in SLI especially in preschool years.
 Children with LD may ignore hard to hear parts of words, such as word endings,
unstressed words, phrases & parts of clauses, when listening to & interpreting spoken
language (Golick, 1976).
 They focus on & remember words in phrases, clauses, sentences & paragraphs which
stand out because of stress or high information content.
 The word endings used for inflection & derivation may cause special problems
because of their short duration & low intensity in running speech.
 Overall language development for children with LD maybe slow (Reed, 1986).
 They may use mature structure less frequently.
 The adolescents with LD have difficulty in understanding, remembering & using
structurally complex sentences.
 Students with learning disabilities between 7-12 years of age show a gradual linear
increase in utterance length (Andolina, 1980), whereas over the same period, normally
achieving children are consistently higher in average utterance length.
 These delays are reflected in both interpreting spoken language & formulating
sentences
 Normal children exhibit rapid growth, whereas Children with LD, constant slow rate
of growth.
 These kind of findings have led many professionals to characterize children with LD
as poor learners of grammatical form.
JUST FOR KNOWLEDGE PURPOSE-

REMEDIATION FOR GRAMMATICAL DISABILITY

The aim is to develop a procedure for analysing the syntactic character of language disorders,
capable of being used routinely by anyone involved with the diagnosis, assessment and
remediation of language disability. Such a procedure would fulfil a variety of functions, of
which we see the following as being the most central.
(i) It must be capable of providing a framework for use as a screening procedure, i.e. as a
technique for determining whether or not there is a case for more systematic linguistic
examination.
(ii) It must be able to provide a comprehensive description of P's syntactic output at any stage
during the processes of assessment and diagnosis.
(iii) It must be able to provide a principled therapeutic methodology. Points (ii) and (iii) are
fundamental, and need further discussion.
Treatment must work within an integrated developmental perspective-by which we mean, in
practical terms, that he must know where he is at any given point in treatment. There are two
sides to this, though: (a) knowing what structures have been acquired (and with what
degree of mastery), and (b) knowing what structures have not been acquired but which
would be appropriate for the stage of development that Patient seems to be at.
General principles to which syntactic procedures should conform:
1. General applicability
2. Clinical relevance
3. Gradability
T's stimuli can be classified into a number of basic functional types, each of which could be
the basis of structural drill:
1. Imitation tasks: 'Elicited' or 'rote' imitation requires P to repeat the whole or part of an
utterance, following an instruction such as 'Say what I say'. A sequence of imitation tasks,
with increasing complexity of structure, may be introduced in this way. These tasks are
currently attracting great interest in psycholinguistics, as it is thought by some that a subject's
performance-in particular, the changes he introduces into a sentence he has been asked to
imitate-can indicate his level of grammatical development. But this conclusion is still
tentative, and in remediation contexts its applicability is untested. Imitation tasks seem to be
of limited value, in that without their large-scale use on a P, they can tell us very little about
how far the child has used his own linguistic system to produce the sentences: he might be
reconstructing it himself, as far as he is able; or he might be parrotting it.
2. Modelled imitation is much more useful as a teaching tool in remedial contexts. This is our
term for the commonly-used technique of obtaining from P spontaneous utterances which
follow T's model, as part of their respective roles in a highly-structured (e.g. game) situation.
Examples are given throughout chapter 7.
3 Incremental drills, in L2 contexts, refer to cases where the learner is asked to complete a
sentence begun by T, sometimes with a fixed phrase, sometimes with any construction. In
therapeutic contexts, there is frequent use made of the 'prompt' (e.g. It's a blue-with
expectant, rising intonation), but, as this term suggests, it is not usually used as a systematic
teaching technique. We find prompts of dubious prognostic value, and of restricted use, as
clearly not every part of a sentence can be readily prompted.
4 Replacement or substitution drills are much less commonly used in therapy than in L2
contexts, and we are unclear as to why this should be so, as they are of great potential value
in remediation. These are drills in which a stimulus sentence is repeated by the learner with
one or more items substituted. The teacher may provide the item to be substituted (e.g. T. The
boy was running. He. - P. He was running.) or some other means may be found to motivate
the substitution, such as pictures (e.g. T. I can see a car - P. I can see a boat.). A whole
sequence of replacements can be made, in a 'chain' replacement drill or game, e.g. X can Y
the Z -X can W the Z -V can W the Z, etc.
5 There are many other types of drill pattern, some of which are cited here to provide a more
adequate illustration of the scope of the language teaching enterprise: none of these, however,
seem to be systematically used in remediation. (The names given to each drill vary somewhat
in the applied linguistic literature.)
(a) Expansion drills ask the learner to add items to a stimulus sentence, e.g. T. He comes on
Mondays. Sometimes. - P. He sometimes comes on Mondays.
(b) Contraction drills ask the learner to shorten a sentence, such as by collapsing_ two
sentences into one, omitting a word or phrase, or replacing a complex construction by some
shorter form (e.g. a Noun Phrase by a Pronoun).
(c) Embedding drills would require the learner to combine two sentences by incorporating
one within the structure of the other, e.g. T. X is there. X is a Y . .... P. X, who is a Y, is there.
(d) Transformational drills introduce structural changes into a sentence, such as the change
from active to passive, positive to negative, or changes in word order.
6. Question-answer drills need separate attention, as the use of a question stimulus usually
accounts for the majority of T's interaction patterns with P. Apart from the linguistic
classification of questions into structural types, T needs to be aware of the demands made
upon P by the choice of one question pattern over another. For example, it is easier to respond
to SV-inversion questions (e.g. with a nod of the head) than to Question-word questions,
which usually require some verbally specific explication. Probably the most difficult kinds of
question (or question substitute) are those which are intended to elicit a general answer, e.g.
What's happening?, Tell me what he's doing, What can you see? These-'open-discussion'
stimuli-are a very common type of question used by Ts in the data we have analysed. Their
difficulty is that they give little or no syntactic help to P in deciding how to answer, and
they may presuppose the abilities one wants to teach (e.g. by demanding a verb in the
response, when P may not have a command of verbs-see further below), or stimulate too wide
and unconnected a range of sentence patterns in response (as is the case with many fluent
dysphasics). Handling open-discussion stimuli is we believe one of the most advanced skills
for P to learn, and he should therefore be introduced to them with caution.
The alternative to open questions is to restrict structurally the possibilities of response in
some way, and the main technique we use here is one we refer to as forced alternative (FA)
questioning. FA questions always conform to the basic pattern Is it X or Y? Their role is to
give P the linguistic stimulus required for his answer (thus minimizing non-linguistic
problems of recall, attention etc.) but without giving him a direct imitation task. P has to
choose which alternative to respond with, and in making his choice he is forced to use his
knowledge of the linguistic system.
To decode an FA:
 He has to know it is a question and has to determine the meanings of the two
alternatives.
 He must then decide which of the two alternatives is appropriate for his response.
 There is therefore something more than imitation involved in this type of processing.
Where the FA, as compared with a simple question, helps the child is in ensuring that he
does not have to recall from long-term memory the name of the action or object he wants
as he is processing his response. If the right level of FA is selected by T, he should answer
appropriately. If too advanced a level is selected, either he will not answer at all, or he
will produce a random or echolalic response. The other strength of the FA technique is
 that it can be focused on any part of sentence structure, and can thus be a way of
controlling P's exposure to different elements or combinations of elements.
The classical build-up of clause structure, using FA, for a child at Stage [ who can name
objects but do little else,8 would proceed in six steps as follows:
1. Elicit verbs: T- is the 'man running/ or is the 'man sleeping/
P- (if he is going to answer at all) running/ or run/ or sleeping! or sleep/ ...
2. Elicit objects: T- is the 'man 'eating an ice-cream! or (is the 'man) 'eating a cake/
P-ice-cream! ...
3. Elicit “VO”: T - is the 'man 'brushing the floor! or 'kicking a ball/
P -'brushing floor/ or 'brush the floor! ...
4. Elicit Subject: T - is the man 'eating! or is the lady 'eating!
P - man! or man 'eating! ...
5. Elicit ‘SV”: T- is the 'man eating! or is the 'lady drinking!
P- 'man eating! or 'lady drink! ...
6. Elicit “SVO”: T- is the 'man 'kicking a ball! or is the 'lady 'eating a cake/
P- 'man 'kick ball/…
A similar procedure could be used for eliciting multiple-element phrase structure,
e.g. T - is it a red 'ball/ or a green 'ball/
P - red/ or red 'ball/ ...
T - is it a 'red ball/ or a 'green engine/
P - 'green engine/ ...
Precautions to be taken:
1. Not to ask P questions which presuppose the linguistic ability that it is the purpose of T to
establish.
2. Not to reinforce the wrong answer.
3. Not to use baby talk.
4. Not to assume errors always indicate disability.
5. Not to vary the stimulus sentence too much.
6. Not to forget about pronunciation while dealing with syntax.
7. Not to try to elicit a structure without checking on comprehension first.
8. Not to get sidetracked.
9. Not to leave too long a gap between sessions.
10. Not to leave too short a gap between sessions.
11. Not to rely so much on home practice.

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