oa Effecten van SLI op Nederlandse congruentie

Effects of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) are often visible in the inflectional system. This also holds for Dutch, where verbal and adjectival inflection are vulnerable in children with SLI. A set of experiments shows that Dutch children with SLI make the same type of overgeneralizations as typically developing children make (and that their mistakes differ from adults acquiring Dutch as a second language). On the other hand, it is shown that SLI is more than just a delay. A comparison of a group of younger and older children with SLI suggests that some effects on inflection are long-lasting. It is argued that the evidence can best be understood if it is assumed that SLI is a result of problems in the processing and interpretation of the input. The same problems may also disturb the production of inflection once the relevant rules have been acquired.