Purpose: To test the proposal that the tense deficit that has been demonstrated for children with specific language impairment (SLI) in other languages is also found in child Spanish and that low performance on tense-related measures can distinguish Spanish-speaking children with SLI from those without.Method: The authors evaluated evidence from existing spontaneous production, elicited production, and grammaticality judgment studies of finiteness in child Spanish. They measured the relationship of 7 spontaneous speech measures with previous receptive and expressive measures of finiteness and performed a discriminant function analysis, using tense as the target variable, to classify monolingual child Spanish (n= 55) as representing SLI or as typically developing (TD).Results: Spontaneous speech measures correlated with the results of previous receptive and expressive measures of child Spanish that show a tense deficit. The SLI group was shown to have statistically lower scores than the TD group on 6 of 7 spontaneous speech measures. Multiple discriminant functions, including tense measures by themselves and in combination with spontaneous speech measures, were shown to provide fair to good sensitivity and specificity in the classification of children as having SLI vs. TD.Conclusion: The findings support the contention that the tense-marking deficit is a plausible clinical marker of SLI for Spanish-speaking children.

El estudio de las citas directas en el discurso oral es uno de los terrenos más fértiles para el análisis e identificación de la variación y el cambio lingüístico (Romaine y Lange, 1991; Ferrara y Bell, 1995; Tagliamonte y Hudson, 1999). La constante incursión de estrategias innovadoras para introducir citas ha sido documentada en inglés, hebreo, alemán y japonés (Maschler, 2002; Buchstaller y D’Arcy, 2009; Buchstaller, 2013). Desafortunadamente, los estudios sobre las citas directas en el español son escasos y se limitan al español peninsular y al español de Puerto Rico. En este trabajo se presenta un análisis de los usos y distribuciones de las estrategias introductoras de citas directas, o marcos introductores de citas, en el habla de la ciudad de México. Los datos fueron extraídos del Corpus sociolingüístico de la ciudad de México (Martín y Lastra, 2011). El análisis muestra que en esta variedad dialectal predominan los verbos dicendi y los marcadores nulos como estrategias para introducir el discurso directo. Asimismo, revela la incursión de nuevas formas que no habían sido documentadas en este dialecto. Finalmente, el análisis de la distribución social de estas formas muestra que es un sistema socialmente estratificado. Si bien no se cuenta con ningún estudio comparativo que permita establecer parámetros en tiempo real, los datos en tiempo aparente aquí presentados sugieren que el sistema de citas directas en el español de México está en proceso de cambio lingüístico.

The Aspect-First Hypothesis observes that children tend to associate the lexical semantics of predicates with grammatical aspect marking and tense, and children with SLI are known to have problems with tense. A theoretical question raised by these facts is whether the SLI difficulty with tense is limited to morphosyntax, or whether it extends to the lexical semantics implicated in the Aspect-First phenomenon as well. In previous work, children with SLI have been less consistent than controls in their Aspect-First prototypical tense–aspect groupings. In the current project, we study the spontaneous production data of 38 five-year-old monolingual Spanish-speakers in Mexico, half of whom are diagnosed with SLI and half of whom are age-matched controls. We coded the spontaneous production of each child’s 20- to 30-minute language sample for tense, grammatical aspect and lexical aspect to determine: (1) whether each group followed Aspect-First prototypical tense–aspect groupings and (2) whether children in the SLI and TD groups were different from one another in their tense–aspect distributions. Children in both groups appeared to follow the Aspect-First prototypes, in contrast to comprehension findings. SLI children were not significantly different from TD children in their distribution of predicates, as a function of tense and lexical aspect, contra elicited production results from English. Results are discussed in terms of methodological and comprehension-production differences.

Background: Child Spanish-speakers appear to use more null subjects than do adults. Null subject use, like the use of tense marking, is sensitive to discourse-pragmatics. Because tense marking has been used to identify child Spanish-speakers with specific language impairment (SLI) with near good sensitivity and specificity (89%), null subject use may as well, following the predictions of the Interface Deficit Hypothesis. We investigate the possibility that null subject occurrence may form part of a useful discriminant function for the identification of monolingual child Spanish-speakers diagnosed with specific language impairment. Methods: We evaluate the rate of null subject expression from spontaneous production data, together with results from independent measures of another discourse-sensitive construction, verb finiteness, in child Spanish. We perform a discriminant function analysis, using null subject expression as a target variable, among others, to classify monolingual child Spanish-speakers (N = 40) as SLI or as typically-developing (TD). Results: The SLI group is shown to have significantly higher scores than the TD group on null subject expression. Multiple discriminant functions, including the null subject variable with tense measures, and in combination with mean length of utterance in words (MLUw), are shown to provide good sensitivity and specificity (<90%) in the classification of children as SLI vs. TD. Conclusion: Our findings support the contention that null subject occurrence is a plausible reflection of the Interface Deficit of SLI for Spanish-speaking children.