Interférences entre phonologie et syntaxe en pathologie développementale du langage

We compare three theories (pure phonological theory, surface theory, and mapping theory) about language developmental disorders considering that phonological difficulties are the main reason for the children’s disorders. First, we identified the linguistic parameters (salience, phonological complexity, syntactic complexity, lexical/functional, semantic/syntactic) that are fundamental to these theories. Then we tested the validity of these parameters by testing them against results obtained by SLI children and control children. Nine syntactic categories were tested (determiner, noun, verb, etc.) No theory could fully explain the results obtained. Some linguistic parameters (eg. phonological complexity) are very interesting but fail to explain all results. Some other parameters (eg. salience) turned out to be inadequate to explain the results of French-speaking children.