Transitives, Intransitives, Causatives and Sentence Types in Malayalam Speaking Children with Intellectual Disability.

Children with Intellectual Disability (CWID) demonstrated an increased performance with increased MA. Higher MA (5-6 years) group produced more sentences per turn and longer sentence length than the lower MA (4-5 years) group. Thus, language performance can be predicted based on what is known about syntax at between 4 and 6 years. It was generally noted that the CWID group produced few spontaneous sentences, i.e., sentences other than what the adult stimuli required. This suggests the possibility that CWID have limitations in the cognitive processing of linguistic input which may occur at the point of decoding, encoding or both. Such difficulties in accessing or recalling information and availability of stored information have been noted previously in the ID population CWID showed delayed development of syntax. The LARSP procedure has been adapted successfully to describe the language of CWID in Kannada (Kumaraswamy, 2021; Subbarao, 1995). The present study followed a similar methodology and described language (in terms of syntax skills) of Malayalam speaking CWID. The objectives of the study were analyzing their expression data on transitives, intransitives, causatives, and sentence types. The description of Malayalam spoken syntactic structures was obtained from two sources, namely Grammar of Malayalam (Nair, 2012) and Malayalam - Descriptive Grammars (Asher, & Kumari, 1997). 60 CWID (4-6 years MA) were studied using natural conversational samples using toys, play materials, pictures. Transitives and intransitive verbs were used equally by CWID groups. Causative forms were used less by CWID groups. This is likely the result of causative forms used less frequently in spoken Malayalam variety of Malayalam sentence types were seen in CWID groups with comparable performance. Wh questions, adjectival use, declaratives were seen in all children. Interrogative sentence usage increased in the higher MA group indicating its developing nature. Generally, no complex sentence usage was observed. Syntax proved to be a difficult part of language performance in CWID. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]