Temporal interface delay and root nonfinite verbs in Spanish-Speaking children with specific language impairment

Existing research into specific language impairment in Spanish utilizes primarily spontaneous production data and concludes that children do not have problems with verb finiteness. In contrast, we show, through a new receptive measure, the “Grammaticality Choice Task”, that the distribution of the 2 most common errors in child Spanish is sufficient to distinguish language-impaired children from age and language control groups. We conclude that finiteness marking on verbs is a promising clinical marker for SLI in Spanish and that spontaneous measures of finiteness marking do not provide the most accurate representation of children’s grammatical competence in the verbal domain in a null subject language such as Spanish.