Childhood bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment
- 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.
Author details: | Tobias RubergORCiDGND, Monika RothweilerGND, João Marques VeríssimoORCiDGND, Harald ClahsenORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000580 |
ISSN: | 1366-7289 |
ISSN: | 1469-1841 |
Title of parent work (English): | Bilingualism: Language and Cognition |
Subtitle (English): | A study of the CP-domain in German SLI |
Publisher: | Cambridge Univ. Press |
Place of publishing: | Cambridge |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2019/10/30 |
Publication year: | 2019 |
Release date: | 2024/04/22 |
Tag: | agreement; child second language acquisition; developmental language impairment; specific language impairment; syntax |
Volume: | 23 |
Issue: | 3 |
Number of pages: | 13 |
First page: | 668 |
Last Page: | 680 |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access / Hybrid Open-Access |
License (German): | CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |
External remark: | Zweitveröffentlichung in der Schriftenreihe Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe ; 870 |