TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ruberg, Tobias
A1  - Rothweiler, Monika
A1  - Veríssimo, João Marques
A1  - Clahsen, Harald
T1  - Childhood bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment
T2  - Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
N2  - This study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish-German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, 'vulnerability of the CP-domain' is not.
KW  - developmental language impairment
KW  - specific language impairment
KW  - child second language acquisition
KW  - syntax
KW  - agreement
Y1  - 2019
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/61402
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 23
IS  - 3
SP  - 668
EP  - 680
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  -