Verb alternations and event structure in children with SLI compared with typically developing children. What can we learn from the story of Cinderella?

Background: Children with specific language impairment (CwSLI) often present with difficulties in areas of language including verb knowledge and verb-argument production. Previous research has investigated verb diversity and verb-argument structure. There is limited knowledge on the processing of event structure by CwSLI and the research around verb alternations is inconclusive. Aims: The research aimed to investigate verb alternations and the complexity of event structures produced by CwSLI compared to typically developing children (TDC). Methods and Procedures: The procedure involved secondary data analysis of an existing data set comprising Cinderella narratives elicited from 65 TDC and 17 CwSLI. The narratives were analysed for verb alternations and event structures of verbs. The participants were compared with subgroups of younger and older TDC and a vocabulary-matched (verb comprehension) group. Outcomes and Results: A total of 31 verbs which could alternate were identified across the dataset. Of these, only the verbs turn into and transform were alternated by two CwSLI and nine TDC. There was a significant difference between CwSLI and TD older children (aged >6; 05) on MLU-w (p=.003), number of verbs (p=.004) and simple event structures (p=.013). Conclusions and Implications: Cinderella narratives are a useful method for comparing CwSLI to TDC given comparable samples in terms of number of utterances. It is not appropriate for examining alternations as few possible alternations were produced across groups. Event processing in CwSLI, should be examined further on a more extensive sample, given the low frequency count for each event variable. There was no difference in event structure between groups when verb knowledge was controlled for, indicating a possible correlation between verb comprehension and verb event structures.