TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ruberg, Tobias
A1  - Rothweiler, Monika
A1  - Veríssimo, João Marques
A1  - Clahsen, Harald
T1  - Childhood bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment
BT  - A study of the CP-domain in German SLI
JF  - 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
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000580
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 23
IS  - 3
SP  - 668
EP  - 680
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - Cambridge
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Adani, Flavia
A1  - Stegenwallner-Schütz, Maja Henny Katherine
A1  - Händler, Yair
A1  - Zukowski, Andrea
T1  - Elicited production of relative clauses in German: Evidence from typically developing children and children with specific language impairment
JF  - First language
N2  - We elicited the production of various types of relative clauses in a group of German-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls in order to test the movement optionality account of grammatical difficulty in SLI. The results show that German-speaking children with SLI are impaired in relative clause production compared to typically developing children. The alternative structures that they produce consist of simple main clauses, as well as nominal and prepositional phrases produced in isolation, sometimes contextually appropriate, and sometimes not. Crucially for evaluating the movement optionality account, children with SLI produce very few instances of embedded clauses where the relative clause head noun is pronounced in situ; in fact, such responses are more common among the typically developing child controls. These results underscore the difficulty German-speaking children with SLI have with structures involving movement, but provide no specific support for the movement optionality account.
KW  - Elicited production
KW  - first language acquisition
KW  - German
KW  - relative clauses
KW  - specific language impairment
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723716648842
SN  - 0142-7237
SN  - 1740-2344
VL  - 36
SP  - 203
EP  - 227
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London
ER  -