Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-t27h7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-17T12:19:34.016Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Between L2 and SLI: inflections and prepositions in the Hebrew of bilingual children with TLD and monolingual children with SLI*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2012

SHARON ARMON-LOTEM
SHARON ARMON-LOTEM*
Affiliation:
Bar Ilan University
*
Address for correspondence: Sharon Armon-Lotem, Bar Ilan University, The Department of English, Ramat Gan, Israel52900. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Verb inflectional morphology and prepositions are loci of difficulty for bilingual children with typical language development (TLD) as well as children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). This paper examines errors in these linguistic domains in these two populations. Bilingual English–Hebrew and Russian–Hebrew preschool children, aged five to seven, with TLD, and age-matched monolingual Hebrew-speaking children with SLI, were tested using sentence completion and sentence imitation tasks in their L2 Hebrew. Our findings show that, despite the similarity in the locus of errors, the two populations can be distinguished by both the quantity and the quality of errors. While bilingual children with TLD had substitution errors often motivated by the first language, most of the errors of monolingual children with SLI involved omission of the whole morpheme or feature reduction. This difference in the nature of the errors is discussed in terms of bilingual processing vs. impaired representation.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 3 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported in part by THE ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (grant No.938) and by the BMBF funded Consortium ‘Migration and Societal Integration’. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

References

REFERENCES

Armon-Lotem, S. (2010). Instructive bilingualism: can bilingual children with SLI rely on one language in learning a second one? Applied Psycholinguistics 31(2), 29–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armon-Lotem, S., Danon, G. & Walters, J. (2008). The use of prepositions by bilingual SLI children: the relative contribution of representation and processing. Proceedings of the Generative Assembly on Language Acquisition 41–46.Google Scholar
Babyonyshev, M., Hart, L. & Grigorenko, E. (2005). The acquisition of passive constructions in Russian children with SLI. Paper presented at Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics – The Princeton Meeting.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E. (2009). Bilingualism: the good, the bad, and the indifferent. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12(1), 3–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bishop, D. V. M. (1994). Grammatical errors in Specific Language Impairment: competence or performance limitation. Applied Psycholinguistics 15, 507–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bishop, D. V. M., Bright, P., James, C., Bishop, S. J. & van der Lely, H. K. J. (2000). Grammatical SLI: a distinct subtype of developmental language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 21, 159–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Botwinik-Rotem, I. (2004). The category P: features, projections, interpretation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Tel Aviv University.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., Bartke, S. & Göllner, S. (1997). Formal features in impaired grammars: a comparison of English and German SLI children. Journal of Neurolinguistics 10, 151–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conti-Ramsden, G., Botting, N. & Faragher, B. (2001). Psycholinguistic markers for specific language impairment (SLI). Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 42, 741–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Crago, M. & Paradis, J. (2003). Two of a kind? Commonalities and variation in languages and language learners. In Levy, Y. & Schaeffer, J. (eds.), Language competence across populations: towards a definition of specific language impairment. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Dromi, E., Leonard, L. & Adam, G. (1997). Evaluating the morphological abilities of Hebrew-speaking children with SLI. Amsterdam Series in Child language Development 6, 65–78.Google Scholar
Dromi, E., Leonard, L., Adam, G. & Zadunaisky-Ehrlich, S. (1999). Verb agreement morphology in Hebrew-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 42, 1414–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dromi, E., Leonard, L. & Shteiman, M. (1993). The grammatical morphology of Hebrew speaking children with specific language impairment: some competing hypotheses. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36, 760–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dulay, H. & Burt, M. (1974). Natural sequences in child second language acquisition. Language Learning 24, 37–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eubank, L. (1994). Optionality and the initial state in L2 development. In Hoekstra, T. & Schwartz, B. D. (eds.), Language acquisition studies in generative grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Fletcher, P. & Garman, M. (1988). Normal language development and language impairment. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 2, 97–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Francis, N. (2011). Imbalances in bilingual development: a key to understanding the faculty of language. Language Sciences 33, 76–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gauthier, K., Genesee, F. & Kasparian, K. (2012). Acquisition of complement clitics and tense morphology in internationally adopted children acquiring French. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15(2), 304–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gopnik, M. (1990). Feature-blindness: a case study. Langauge Acquisition 1(2), 139–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goralnik, E. (1995). Goralnik Screening Test for Hebrew. Even Yehuda: Matan [in Hebrew].Google Scholar
Grela, B., Rashiti, L & Soares, M. (2004). Dative prepositions in children with Specific Language Impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 25, 467–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grüter, T. & Crago, M. (2011). Object clitics and their omission in child L2 French: the contributions of processing limitations and L1 transfer. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14(1), 1–19.Google Scholar
Hadley, P. & Rice, M. (1996). Emergent use of BE and DO: evidence from children with specific language impairment. Language Acquisition 5, 209–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamann, C. & Belletti, A. (2008). Developmental patterns in the acquisition of complement clitic pronouns: comparing different acquisition modes with an emphasis on French. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa 31, 39–78.Google Scholar
Iluz-Cohen, P. (2008). Language proficiency, language control and executive control in bilingual children. Unpublished master's thesis, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.Google Scholar
Johnston, J. R. & Kamhi, A. G. (1984). Syntactic and semantic aspects of the utterances of language impaired children: the same can be less. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 30, 65–85.Google Scholar
Kohnert, K. (2008). Language disorders in bilingual children and adults. San Diego, CA: Plural.Google Scholar
Leonard, L. (1998). Children with Specific Language Impairment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google ScholarPubMed
Leonard, L. (2003). Specific Language Impairment: characterizing the deficit. In Levy, Y. & Schaeffer, J. (eds.), Language competence across populations: toward a definition of specific language impairment. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Nicoladis, N. (2006). Cross-linguistic transfer in adjective–noun strings by preschool bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 9(1), 15–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Novogrodsky, R. & Friedmann, N. (2006). The production of relative clauses in SLI: a window to the nature of the impairment. Advances in Speech-Language Pathology 8(4), 364–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. (1999). What do specifically-language impaired and second language children have in common. Child Language Bulletin 19, 4–6.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2008). Tense as a clinical marker in English L2 acquisition with language delay/impairment. In Gavruseva, E. & Haznedar, B. (eds.), Current trends in child second language acquisition: a generative perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2010a). The interface between bilingual development and specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 31, 227–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. (2010b). Response to commentaries on the interface between bilingual development and specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 31, 345–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. & Crago, M. (2000). Tense and temporality: similarities and differences between language-impaired and second-language children. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 43(4), 834–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. & Crago, M. (2003). What can SLI tell us about transfer in SLA? In Liceras, J. M. et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2002), 219–26. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
Paradis, J., Emmerzael, K. & Duncan, T. S. (2010). Assessment of English language learners: using parent report on first language development. Journal of Communication Disorders 43(6), 474–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Portocarrero, J. S., Burright, R. G. & Donovick, P. J. (2007). Vocabulary and verbal fluency of bilingual and monolingual college students. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 22, 415–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pyers, J. E., Gollan, T. H. & Emmorey, K. (2009). Bimodal bilinguals reveal the source of tip-of-the-tongue states. Cognition 112, 323–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ravid, D., Levie, R. & Avivi-Ben Zvi, G. (2003). Morphological disorders. In Verhoeven, L. & van Balkom, Hans (eds.), Classification of developmental language disorders: theoretical issues and clinical implications. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Rice, M. L. (2004). Growth models of developmental language disorders. In Rice, M. L. & Warren, S. (eds.), Developmental language disorders: from phenotypes to etiologies. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rice, M. L. & Wexler, K. (1996). Toward tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English-speaking children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 39, 1239–57.Google ScholarPubMed
Roeper, T., Ramos, E., Seymour, H. N. & Abdul-Karim, L. (2001). Language disorders as a window on a universal grammar: an abstract theory of agreement for IP, DP, and V-PP. Brain and Language 77(3), 378–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., Salmon, D. P. & Butters, N. (1995). Retrieval from semantic memory and its implications for Alzheimer's disease. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 21, 1127–39.Google ScholarPubMed
Sandoval, T. C., Gollan, T. H., Ferreira, V. S. & Salmon, D. P. (2010). What causes the bilingual disadvantage in verbal fluency? The dual-task analogy. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13(2), 231–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, B. D. (2004). Why Child L2 Acquisition? In Van Kampen, J. & Baauw, S. (eds.), The proceedings of GALA 2003. LOT Occasional Series.Google Scholar
Tallal, P. & Stark, R. (1981). Speech acoustic-cue discrimination abilities of normally developing and language-impaired children. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 69, 568–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Thordardottir, E. (2008). Language specific effects of task demands on the manifestation of specific language impairment: a comparison of English and Icelandic. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 51, 922–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vainikka, A. (2010). All acquisition begins with the projection of a bare verb phrase. Applied Psycholinguistics 31, 332–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vainikka, A. & Young-Scholten, M. (2007). Minimalism vs. organic syntax. In Karimi, S., Samiian, V. & Wilkins, W. (eds.), Clausal and phrasal architecture: syntactic derivation and interpretation. Papers in honour of Joseph Emonds. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
van der Lely, H. (2003). Do heterogeneous deficits require heterogeneous theories? SLI subgroups and the RDDR hypothesis. In Levy, Y. & Schaeffer, J. (eds.), Language competence across populations: toward a definition of specific language impairment. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
van der Lely, H. (1998). SLI in children: movement, economy and deficits in the computational-syntactic system. Language Acquisition 7, 161–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walters, J. (2005). Bilingualism: the sociopragmatic and psycholinguistic interface. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Washington, J. A. & Craig, H. K. (2004). A language screening protocol for use with young African American children in urban settings. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 13, 329–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Watkins, R. & Rice, M. (1991). Verb particle and preposition acquisition in language impaired preschoolers. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 34, 1130–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wexler, K. (1998). Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint: a new explanation of the optional infinitive stage. Lingua 106, 23–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiig, E. H., Secord, W. A. & Semel, E. M. (2004). Clinical evaluation of language fundamentals – preschool 2. San Antonio, TX: Harcourt/Psych Corp.Google Scholar
Yan, S. & Nicoladis, E. (2009). Finding le mot juste: differences between bilingual and monolingual children's lexical access in comprehension and production. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12, 323–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar