Applied Psycholinguistics 31 (2010), 463–487
doi:10.1017/S014271641000007X
What compound words mean to
children with specific language
impairment
KARLA K. MCGREGOR, GWYNETH C. ROST, LING YU GUO,
and LI SHENG
University of Iowa
Received: November 5, 2008 Accepted for publication: June 21, 2009
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE
Karla K. McGregor, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 121-C Speech and
Hearing Center, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242. E-mail: karla-mcgregor@uiowa.edu
ABSTRACT
Sixteen children (17 age mates, 17 vocabulary mates) with specific language impairment (SLI)
participated in two studies. In the first, they named fantasy objects. All groups coined novel noun–
noun compounds on a majority of trials but only the SLI group had difficulty ordering the nouns as
dictated by semantic context. In the second study, the children described the meaning of conventional
noun–noun compounds. The SLI and AM groups did not differ in parsing the nouns, but the SLI group
was poorer at explaining the semantic relationships between them. Compared to vocabulary mates, a
larger proportion of the SLI group successfully parsed the compounds but a smaller proportion could
explain them. These difficulties may reflect problems in the development of links within the semantic
lexicon.
A categorization of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary reveals compounds to be
the most common words in the English language. In a sample of 2,076 words, 30%
were compounds, 28% were derivations, 24% were single roots, 8% were proper
names, and 10% were other word types (Goulden, Nation, & Read, 1990). Of
all compounds, those formed from two root nouns (NN) are especially numerous
(Carr, 1959). Given their ubiquity, the speaker of English would be unable to
communicate precisely and effectively without command of compounds.
In NN compounds, the first root functions as the modifier, the second as the
head. The semantic relationship between the modifier and head nouns is one of
categorization and specification. The head noun categorizes the referent and the
modifier noun specifies the subtype, serving to differentiate it from other members
of the category. Thus, for example, a cherry tree is a tree that bears cherries, not
apples or pears. The correct syntax of modifier and head in a NN compound
is determined semantically. Consider compound pairs like bumper car and car
bumper, cake pan and pan cake, and dog show and show dog. Either syntactic
order can be correct given an intended meaning.
© Cambridge University Press 2010 0142-7164/10 $15.00
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Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty ordering NN
compounds (Grela, Snyder, & Hiramatsu, 2005). We hypothesize that this difficulty
is at least partially semantic in nature; more precisely, these children misorder
compounds because they fail to appreciate the semantic relationship between the
modifier and the head. In this paper we report comparisons of children with SLI
and their unaffected age mates (AMs) and vocabulary mates (VMs) in two studies
designed to test this hypothesis. In Study 1, the children coined novel compounds
given a semantic context that motivated the order of the modifier and head. In
Study 2, these children explained the modifier–head relationships in conventional
compounds.
THE ACQUISITION OF COMPOUNDS
Compounds are represented in the vocabularies of children as young as 1 and 2
years of age. Although the earliest uses are likely rote, children begin to parse
compounds at a very young age. Two sources of evidence include children’s
overt comments on word structure and their combining of roots to coin novel
compounds, as seen in the examples from Child D below.
“D(2;4,3 [years;months,days] looking at a toy car): That a motor-car. It got a motor.”
(Clark, 1993, p. 40)
“D(2;7,1): It’s a water-cake . . . I made it in the water.” (Clark, 1993, p. 40)
One factor influencing the child’s analysis of any given compound is the size of
the compound family. Modifiers and heads from large compound families promote
analysis because the pattern of their combination is highly salient. For example,
the modifier and head of the compound chocolate cake are from high-frequency
families; many compounds include the modifier chocolate (e.g., chocolate + bar,
pudding, pie, fudge, candy, milk) and many include the head cake (e.g., lemon,
coconut, pound, layer, cup, griddle, angel food, + cake). This may well relate
to the early coining of “water cake” in the example above. When 3- to 5-year-
olds were asked to explain the meaning of NN compounds (i.e., why do we say
chocolate cake?), they were more likely to mention a root from a large family than
from a small family, suggesting that high-frequency patterns promote the child’s
parsing and analysis via analogy (Krott & Nicoladis, 2005; Nicoladis & Krott,
2007).
As children become increasingly able to analyze and manipulate modifier and
head roots, knowledge of the semantic relationship between these roots begins to
emerge (Berko, 1958; Nicoladis, 2002). When asked to match compound words to
their pictured referents, preschoolers correctly interpret head nouns as indicative
of the general category; that is, they select a picture of a knife, not an apple, in
response to apple knife (Clark, Gelman, & Lane, 1985). When asked to explain
the meaning of compounds, preschoolers are more likely to mention the modifier
than the head root. This is true both for young speakers of English, where the
head appears at the right edge of the compounds (Krott & Nicoladis, 2005) and
French, where it appears at the left (Nicoladis & Krott, 2007). Nicoladis and
Krott take this as evidence that preschoolers already have some understanding
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that compounds refer to subcategories and that it is therefore more important
to mention the modifier, which specifies the subcategory, than the head, which
indicates the general category.
This understanding is more advanced among 4-year-olds than 3-year-olds. In
a forced-choice recognition task in which the children heard novel compounds
(e.g., fish shoe) and then selected the target referent (a shoe decorated with fish)
from among three foils (a fish, a shoe, and a shoe surrounded by fish), both 3- and
4-year-olds selected the target on a majority of trials. However, 3-year-olds were
more likely than 4-year-olds to select the object named by the head noun (i.e., the
shoe), suggesting that they did not yet completely appreciate that NN compounds
specify the subtype, not the general type, of the referent (Nicoladis, 2002).
Just as children are better able to parse compounds composed of frequent than
infrequent modifiers and heads, they may have a better understanding of modifier–
head relationships that are frequent in the language. When faced with determining
the semantic relationship within a novel compound (e.g., what does pepper bread
mean; what does cheese fish mean?), 4- and 5-year-olds used their knowledge of
semantic relationships within real compounds that shared heads with the novel
compounds (Krott, Gagne´, & Nicoladis, 2009). The influence of the head was
greater for large families (e.g., bread is a frequent head) than for small families
(e.g., fish is an infrequent head). For frequent heads, children tended to interpret
the novel compound according to the dominant (most consistent) modifier–head
relationship associated with the head noun. Thus, via analogy to cinnamon bread,
for example, most of the children interpreted pepper bread as bread that has
pepper in it (Krott et al., 2009). Frequency continues to affect comprehension
of modifier–head relationships in adults but, unlike children, adults are more
influenced by modifier than head frequency (Krott et al., 2009).
ERRORS IN COMPOUND WORD FORMATION AMONG
CHILDREN WITH SLI
Despite being ubiquitous in the language and early in development, compounds
constitute a challenge for children with SLI. Most extant evidence concerns their
ability to obey morphological constraints on the internal structure of compounds.
In English, there is a constraint against pluralizing the modifier of a NN compound
(e.g., rat-eater, but not rats-eater, is allowed). School-aged English speakers with
SLI obey this constraint less consistently than their unaffected AMs (Oetting
& Rice, 1993; Van der Lely & Christian, 2000) and less consistently than their
younger language mates in some cases (Van der Lely & Christian, 2000), but not
others (Oetting & Rice, 1993). Difficulties with morphophonological aspects of
compounding have also been reported for children with SLI who speak Greek
(Dalalakis, 1999; Kehayia, 1997) and Japanese (Fukuda & Fukuda, 1999).
Data on syntactic and semantic aspects of compounding are more limited. One
exception is the work of Grela and colleagues (2005). They asked English speakers
with SLI (ages 4 years, 8 months [4;8] to 7;0) to label fantasy objects such as a
car shaped like a shoe. They recognized three potential challenges for the children
with SLI. Of most interest here, they examined adherence to a syntactic constraint,
namely, that the modifier is ordered before the head (e.g., a hat made of rocks is a
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rock hat, not a hat rock). They also examined adherence to a semantic constraint
on the nature of the modifier. For example modifiers specifying material are fine
(e.g., rock hat) but modifiers specifying quantity are not (e.g., if it is a hat for some
people one cannot call it a some hat). Finally, like previous investigators, they
examined the children’s adherence to a morphological constraint barring plurals
from the modifier (e.g., a hat made of rocks is a rock hat not a rocks hat).
The SLI group coined as many NN compounds as a normal comparison group
comprising peers who were an average of 8 months younger. As in Oetting and
Rice (1993), the children with SLI were as capable as their younger peers in
obeying the morphological constraint against plurals within compounds. They
were also aware that some meanings cannot be expressed via compounding. They
tended not to coin compounds in contexts that expressed quantity, thus obeying
that semantic constraint. However, the children with SLI were more prone to
misordering of the modifier–head relationship, producing for example, car shoe
instead of shoe car. The children did seem to have some knowledge of the correct
order as they performed significantly above chance. Instead, their application
of this knowledge was vulnerable and perhaps especially vulnerable given the
task demands. Specifically, the nature of the task instructions was such that the
examiner always presented the modifier after the head (e.g., “what would we call
a hat made of rocks”). This presented a processing load such that the child had to
reorder hat and rock before responding. Grela and colleagues (2005) concluded
that, given a high processing load, a weakness in syntactic ability was revealed.
We do not necessarily disagree with this explanation, but we do think it incom-
plete to refer to the problem as syntactic. What made shoe car, rather than car
shoe, correct in the Grela et al. (2005) study was the semantic context. The picture
of the fantasy object shoe car was presented along side a picture of a book car.
In this particular semantic context, car must be the head; shoe and book modify
the head thereby specifying its subtype. The syntax of the compound requires the
knowledge that object names relate hierarchically such that subcategories (e.g.,
shoe car and book car) exist within more general categories (e.g., car). In the
current study we hypothesized that the limitation children with SLI display in or-
dering NN compounds reflects a lack of appreciation of the semantic relationships
between the modifier and head.
Our hypothesis is motivated by a growing literature on semantic deficits among
children with SLI. As a group, children with SLI begin to convey meaning via
spoken words 11 months later than do typical children (Trauner, Wulfeck, Tallal,
& Hesselink, 1995). Deficits in receptive vocabulary (Bishop, 1997; Clarke &
Leonard, 1996) and expressive vocabulary (Leonard, Miller, & Gerber, 1999;
Thal, O’Hanlon, Clemmons, & Fralin, 1999; Watkins, Kelly, Harbers, & Hollis,
1995) characterize many preschoolers with SLI. During the school years, these
deficits may become more marked (Haynes, 1992; Stothard, Snowling, Bishop,
Chipchase, & Kaplan, 1998). The problem is not only in knowing enough words
but also in establishing a rich understanding of the meaning of any given word
(McGregor & Appel, 2002; McGregor, Newman, Reilly, & Capone, 2002; Munro,
2007).
Even more pertinent to the semantics of compounding is knowledge of mean-
ingful relationships between words. Children with SLI exhibit difficulty here as
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well. Compared to their unaffected AMs, school children with SLI are less likely
to specify semantic category relationships in noun definitions (Dockrell, Messer,
George, & Ralli, 2003); they are slow to recognize category members (Simmonds,
Messer, & Dockrell, 2005); and they fail to take advantage of category organization
when recalling word lists (Kail & Leonard, 1986). On repeated word association
tasks, children with SLI respond with fewer semantically related words and more
errors than both same-age peers and younger vocabulary-matched peers, suggest-
ing weaker links between words in the semantic lexicon (Sheng & McGregor,
2008).
In training studies, one sees the emergence of these problems with semantic
relationships. For example, over an 8-week period, Munro (2007) taught 5- and
6-year-olds novel words for subcategories of familiar objects (e.g., tus referred to
a blue wool sock worn in the winter). A posttest included a word association task
to tap the semantic networks the children had built during training. In the normal
comparison group, most responses were semantic and 17% of those semantic
responses reflected knowledge of the noun hierarchy (e.g., tus elicited glove, a
semantic coordinate of tus). Despite receiving the same frequency of input during
training as the children in the normal comparison group, the children in the SLI
group responded most often with a word that was related to the phonological form
of the trained word (e.g., tus elicited tug). Of the semantic responses that did result,
only 7% reflected knowledge of the noun hierarchy.
CURRENT STUDIES
Given their documented semantic deficits, we hypothesized that children with SLI
misorder NN compounds in part because they lack an appreciation of the semantic
relationship between the modifier and head roots. To test this hypothesis, we
compared children with SLI to two groups of unaffected peers, AMs and younger
VMs, in two studies measuring semantic knowledge of NN compounds. The first
study involved a task similar to that used by Grela et al. (2005) and also Dalalakis
(1999) in that children were asked to coin novel NN compounds in response to
pictures of fantasy objects. We were interested in whether they included both the
modifier and the head in their naming responses and, of more importance, if so,
whether they ordered these two roots correctly. It was critical that the correct order
was determined by the semantic context provided within the task itself. Given the
expected developmental course of NN compound acquisition, we predicted that
all groups would be better at including a modifier and head root than at ordering
those roots. Given semantic weaknesses on the part of children with SLI and the
semantic basis for the modifier–head order, we predicted that the performance gap
between including and ordering would be particularly wide for the SLI group.
A secondary goal for this study was to describe the extent to which the deficits
exhibited by the children with SLI were because of performance demands. We
operationalized performance demand by varying the support of models prior to
the child’s ordering of the modifier and head. Performance should be poorest
following models of the two root nouns in the reverse order of that required in the
compound.
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The second study tested the semantic basis of the compounding problem more
directly. Following Krott and Nicoladis (2005), the children were asked to parse
and explain the meaning of conventional NN compounds. Krott and Nicoladis
focused on parsing ability of their young participants, but we expected that our
older participants would do well with parsing but would have some difficulty with
the developmentally more advanced chore of explaining the modifier–head rela-
tionship. We predicted that the performance gap between parsing and explanation
would be particularly pronounced for the children with SLI.
STUDY 1
Method
Participants. Participants were 16 children with SLI (14 boys) and 34 children
without. Seventeen of the children without SLI (6 boys) served as AMs; 17
(9 boys) served as expressive VMs. One boy with SLI participated in Study 2
only. All other children participated in both Studies 1 and 2. The studies were
administered in counterbalanced order across participants. Forty-one of the 50
participants (all but 2 participants in the SLI group, 1 in the AM group, and 6
in the VM group) also took part in a study of lexical organization that involved
word repetition, naming, and word association (Sheng & McGregor, 2008). The
ordering of the compounding tasks and the lexical organization tasks was also
counterbalanced across participants.
Table 1 compares the demographic and test score characteristics of the three
groups. SLI group participants ranged in age from 5;0 (60 months) to 8;6
(102 months), the AM group participants ranged from 5;0 (60 months) to 8;7
(103 months), and the VM group participants ranged from 3;4 (40 months) to 8;6
(102 months). To be included in the SLI group, a child had to be on a current
caseload for remediation of oral language deficits and had to score at least 1.3
SD below the mean or poorer on at least two of three standardized language
measures that we administered prior to the study: the Structured Photographic
Expressive Language Test (SPELT; Dawson, Stout, & Eyer, 2003), a measure
of morphosyntactic production; the nonword repetition subtest of the NEPSY
(Korkman, Kirk, & Kemp, 1998), a measure of phonological short-term memory;
and the Test of Narrative Language (Gillam & Pearson, 2004), a measure of
the comprehension and production of stories. These tests were selected because
deficits in morphosyntax, phonological memory, and narrative discourse are highly
characteristic of SLI (Leonard, 1998) and because the tests themselves have good
sensitivity and specificity (Gillam & Pearson, 2004; Korkman et al., 1998, p. 225;
Perona, Plante, & Vance, 2005). To be selected for the AM or VM groups, a child
had to have no history of special services for language and had to score better than
1 SD below the mean on all three of the standardized language measures.
To not bias the results of the study, the children with SLI were selected without
regard to their lexical–semantic abilities; however, to better describe the partici-
pants and interpret their performance, we administered two measures of lexical
semantics, the Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT; Williams, 1997) and the Peabody
Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition (PPVT-III, Dunn & Dunn, 1997). As a
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McGregor et al.: What compound words mean to children with SLI
Table 1. Demographic information and standardized test scores by participa
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