Abstract

We describe a program of cross-cultural research on children with specific language impairment (SLI), to determine wheter these children display different patterns of morpho-syntactic deficit as a function of the language to wich they are exposed. Children with SLI from several countries were asked to describe pictures that elicit the obligatory use of certain grammatical morphemes that have proven to be particolourly interesting for this cross-linguistic comparison. The differences encountered by children with SLI in different languages (Hebrew, English, Italian, German and Swedish) appear to be tightly tied to differences in the richness of the morphological paradigms in each language, with special regard to the phonetic and prosodic characteristics of those morphemes in each language.