An Analysis of Verb Pattern Errors in Active-Passive/Passive-Active Sentence Transformation in English made by Upper Primary Singaporean & Malaysian Chinese Children with Specific Language Impairment

Yap and Chia (2009) have put forth their operating definition of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) as “… NOT a speech disorder – that is a result of difficulties in coordination of oral-motor musculature (Cohen, 2002) – but a specific (NOT nonspecific) developmental (NOT acquired) language disorder affecting BOTH receptive and expressive language skills with varying degree of severity (either receptive language difficulty is more severe than expressive language difficulty or vice versa), typically in the context of normal development (Cohen, 2002), whose prevalence could be between 6 and 6 percent of preschool children (Simpson & Rice, 2002), and its onset may be as early as 3 or 4 years old (Ervin, 2001), with impoverished vocabulary, word-finding difficulties and problem in acquiring new words (Bishop, 1979; Cohen, 2002), problems in producing and comprehending syntactically complex sentences (especially in passive voice) and often preferring to express in short utterances (Ervin, 2001; Muter & Likierman, 2008), and may be at risk of developing a literacy disorder (Manzo & Manzo, 1993) – either process or product literacy deficit (Chia, 2007) – and is known to persist into adolescence and adulthood (Simpson & Rice, 2002).