Morphology and language pathologies in Spanish

Resumo

Language difficulties in the acquisition of morphology are mainly found in specific language impairment (SLI). Language impairments can be classified as developmental or acquired disorders. The most frequent disorder affecting the acquisition, processing and attrition of morphology is specific language impairment. This disorder is a delay in the onset of language once it has been acquired, in the absence of any other neurological, cognitive or psychological difficulties. Gathercole explains the language of SLI children as a deficit in phonological memory, SLI children having limited phonological memory capacity. Due to this limited capacity, SLI children would have a deficient phonological representation of words, which would worsen the analysis of inflectional morphology and would cause a reduced lexical repertoire. One of the aims of the research in this field has been to describe the linguistic properties of the language produced by SLI children.