Comprehension and production of French object clitics by child second language learners and children with specific language impairment

Abstract

The objective of this research was to compare child second language (L2) learners and children with specific language impairment (SLI) on both production and comprehension in order to investigate whether the similarity of their error profiles observed in spontaneous production extends to comprehension. Results are presented from an elicited production and a sentence-picture matching task targeting accusative object clitics in French. As groups, both L2 learners and children with SLI show a low rate of clitic suppliance in production, yet perform well on the comprehension task. No statistically significant differences are found between the two groups on either task. Analyses of individual results, however, reveal diversity within both groups. Although there seems to be a correlation between performance in production and comprehension in the L2 group, this is not the case in the SLI group.Until recently, there has been little contact between research on second language acquisition (SLA) and research on specific language impairment (SLI), although one of the central issues in both fields (the source of developmental errors made by the respective learners) is strikingly similar. Despite somewhat different terminologies, both fields engage in an ongoing debate between those locating the learners' deficit in grammatical representations and those seeking an account outside the grammar proper, that is, in performance or processing limitations.In the past few years, a small number of studies has drawn attention to the surprising similarities in the spontaneous speech of children with SLI and child L2 learners. The first to point out the parallels between the two learner groups were Håkansson and Nettelbladt (1993, 1996;Håkansson, 2001) in studies on the acquisition of word order in Swedish. They found that both Swedish children with SLI and child L2 learners of Swedish produced ungrammatical verb-third utterances (instead of grammatical verb-second), an error never seen in the first language (L1) acquisition of Swedish by normally developing children according to these authors. They observed that "[t]he SLI children behave as if Swedish were not their first, but rather their second, language" (Håkansson & Nettelbladt,

Critical periods and SLI

“…This potential overlap of SLI and L2 features in SLI might have influenced the results on similarities between SLI and cL2. Such similarities have been reported by Håkansson & Nettelbladt (1996), Paradis & Crago (2000), Håkansson (2001Håkansson ( , 2003, Grüter (2005), Paradis et al (2008) 2 and Orgassa & Weerman (2008). In some of these studies, the authors briefly address the question of age and maturation (Crago & Paradis 2003, Orgassa & Weerman 2008 3 ), and Håkansson (2001) proposes "a common denominator for grammatical problems in L2 children and children with SLI" (Hå-kansson 2001: 96).…”

“…4. The ages of the SLI children in the above mentioned studies range from 4;0 to 8;4 in Håkansson & Nettelbladt (1996), and from 6;6 to 9;2 in Grüter (2005 In unimpaired first language acquisition, children adhere to these restrictions. From early on, finite verbs precede nicht and non-finite verbs follow it (Clahsen 1990(Clahsen , 1991.…”

Domain-General Versus Domain-Specific Accounts of Specific Language Impairment: Evidence From Bilingual Children's Acquisition of Object Pronouns

“…With respect to French, the use of object clitics is relatively late in the language production of TD monolingual and bilingual children; they emerge later than subject and reflexive clitics, between the ages of 2;6 and 3;0, and object omissions are the most common errors in contexts where pronominalization is felicitous (Chillier et al (2001), Clark (1985), Granfeldt and Schlyter (2004), Hamann, Rizzi, and Frauenfelder (1996), Hulk (2000), Jakubowicz, Müller, Kang, Riemer, and Rigaut (1996), Jakubowicz and Rigaut (2000), Kaiser (1994)). As in Italian and Spanish, the acquisition of object clitics is highly problematic for French-speaking children with SLI because they use object clitics intermittently, frequently producing sentences with object omissions even past the age of school entry in contrast to unaffected age mates (Chillier et al (2001), Grüter (2005), Hamann (2004), Hamann et al (2002), Jakubowicz, Nash, Rigaut, and Gérard (1998), Paradis (2004)). …”

The acquisition of tense in English: Distinguishing child second language from first language and specific language impairment

“…More recently, research comparing the morphosyntax of child L2 learners to same-aged L1 learners with specific language impairment (SLI) in French and Swedish has also showed striking similarities between these two groups (Crago & Paradis, 2003;Grüter, 2005;Håkansson 2001;Paradis & Crago, 2000Paradis, 2004). Paradis (2005) found evidence for SLI-like patterns in child English L2 learners' acquisition of grammatical morphology, but to date, no direct comparison of English L2 and SLI acquisition of morphosyntax has been undertaken.…”