Inference of Verb Meaning Using Morphosyntactic Clues in Preschool Children with Delayed Language Development

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to determine whether preschool children with delayed language development use morphosyntactic clues such as particles or arguments when understanding the meaning of new verbs. Methods: The participants were 16 children aged 4 to 5 years with delayed language development and 16 children whose chronological age was matched. We analyze the characteristic of the two groups understanding the meaning of sentences containing new actions through particles tasks and argument tasks. Results: First, as a result of comparing the differences between the two groups in the particles conditions (nominative, objective), there was no significant difference in the correct response scores between the two groups in the nominative particle condition. Second, there was a significant difference in the correct response scores between the two groups in the objective particle condition. Lastly, there was no significant difference in the response ratio according to the group and argument condition. Regardless of the number of arguments, all children chose more relational action scenes than independent action scenes. Conclusion: In the particles task, children with language delay showed similar performance to typical children in the nominative case condition, but showed difficulty in the objective case condition. Children with language delay were able to infer verb meaning using particle cues, just like typical children. However, this ability was limited in the objective particle condition. In the argument task, there was no significant difference between the two groups, indicating that inferring verb meaning was not affected by the number of nouns.