Specific Language Impairment and Early Second Language Acquisition: The Risk of Over- and Underdiagnosis

Grimm, Angela; Schulz, Petra

doi:10.1007/s12187-013-9230-6

Cited by 73 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Leonard 2014). All children were enrolled in speech and language therapy and in addition scored below their age-appropriate norms in at least two out of nine scales in the standardized language test LiSe-DaZ normed for eL2 children (Schulz and Tracy 2011) (for details on this SLI criterion, see Grimm and Schulz [2014]). In addition, none of the children had any articulatory problems.…”

Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How strong is the ban on non-finite verbs in V2? Evidence from early second language learners of German with and without SLI

Schulz

Schwarze

2017

Zeitschrift Für Sprachwissenschaft

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Abstract:Using the standardized test LiSe-DaZ across four test rounds, we collected elicited production data from 22 typically developing early second language learners (eL2 TD) of German (mean age at T1: 3;7) and 11 older eL2 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (mean age at T1: 7;1). Focusing on the relation between verb placement and verbal inflectional morphology two questions were addressed: Do eL2 children obey the ban on non-finite verbs in verb-second position (V2) in German, and do eL2 SLI children differ from their eL2 TD peers in their morpho-syntactic behavior? This is the first study on this issue to systematically differentiate between V2 and verb-final position (Vf) and between bare verb forms and infinitives, based on a large sample of elicited production data. Results show that from the first test round onwards verbal inflectional morphology and verb placement were strongly related in the TD and the SLI group. Bare verb forms occurred in V2 only and are argued to be finite; en-infinitives were restricted to Vf. We conclude that a) the restrictions for morphological markings are inextricably tied to specific syntactic positions, b) that this knowledge is still accessible when L2 acquisition starts around age 3, and c) that the ban on non-finite verbs in V2 is invulnerable in eL2 TD and in SLI, indicating that SLI is matter of severe delay.

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Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How strong is the ban on non-finite verbs in V2? Evidence from early second language learners of German with and without SLI

Schulz

Schwarze

2017

Zeitschrift Für Sprachwissenschaft

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“…Extended use of infinitives has been described as a marker of SLI for English (Rice and Wexler, 1996), omission of object clitics for French (Jakubowicz et al, 1998;Paradis et al, 2003) and problems with subject-verb agreement (SVA) together with the use of infinitives and errors in verb placement for German (Clahsen, 1991;Hamann et al, 1998), to mention only some results from well-studied languages. The bigger challenge is, however, that there is an overlap in the linguistic structures that are difficult to master for bilingual children with those structures that are considered clinical markers for SLI in a particular target language; Håkansson and Nettelbladt (1996) were the first to point this out for Swedish, Paradis (2010), Hamann (2012), and Grimm and Schulz (2014) give more recent overviews of similarities and differences. This overlap in error patterns leads to over-and underdiagnosis, see Genesee et al (2004).…”

Section: Introduction Bilingual Language Development and Language Impmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methods for Identifying Specific Language Impairment in Bilingual Populations in Germany

Hamann

Ibrahim

2017

Front. Commun.

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This study investigates the performance of 22 monolingual and 54 bilingual children with and without specific language impairment (SLI), in a non-word repetition task (NWRT) and a sentence repetition task (SRT). Both tasks were constructed according to the principles for LITMUS tools (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) developed within COST Action IS0804 and incorporated phonological or syntactic structures that are lin guistically complex and have been shown to be difficult for children with SLI across languages. For phonology these are in particular (non)words containing consonant clusters. In morphosyntax, complexity has been attributed to factors such as embedding and/or syntactic movement. Tasks focusing on such structures are expected to identify SLI in bilinguals across language combinations. This is notoriously difficult because structures that are problematic for typically developing bilinguals (BiTDs) and monolingual children with SLI (MoSLI) often overlap. We show that the NWRT and the SRT are reliable tools for identification of SLI in bilingual contexts. However, interpretation of the performance of bilingual children depends on background information as provided by parental questionnaires. To evaluate the accuracy of our tasks, we recruited children in ordinary kindergartens or schools and in speech language therapy centers and verified their status with a battery of standardized language tests, assessing bilingual children in both their languages. We consider a bilingual child language impaired if she shows impairments in two language domains in both her languages. For assessment, we used tests normed for monolinguals (with one exception) and adjusted the norms for bilingualism and for language dominance. This procedure established the following groups: 10 typical monolinguals (MoTD), 12 MoSLI, 46 BiTD, and 8 bilingual children with SLI (BiSLI). Our results show that both tasks target relevant structures: monolingual children are classified with 100% accuracy. Crucially, both our tasks distinguish BiTDs from MoSLIs and BiTDs from BiSLIs. The NWRT shows high accuracy and only minimal influence of language dominance. The SRT can be scored as "identical repetition" or as "target structure," the latter aiming for scoring the mastery of a syntactic structure, ignoring lexical and specific case or gender errors. Focusing on the latter measure, we examine individual cases of BiTDs with unexpected, low scores. We identify first-language dominance as a factor influencing performance but crucially find that testing in the home language in a heritage context might lead to unreliable classifications and that our procedure for determining the clinical group of bilinguals missed cases of selective impairments such as syntactic SLI.

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“…Such similarities can cause a dilemma for diagnosis: the deviant linguistic development of a child with SLI may be incorrectly attributed to L2 learning, while a child L2 learner may be misdiagnosed as having SLI. There is indeed evidence for such misdiagnosis (Grimm and Schulz 2014;Hamann 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subject-verb agreement in German in bilingual children with and without SLI

Rothweiler

Schönenberger

Sterner

2017

Zeitschrift Für Sprachwissenschaft

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Abstract:We investigated the acquisition of subject-verb agreement (SVA) in German based on spontaneous speech data from both typically developing (TD) and language-impaired (SLI) children learning German as a second language (L2), and from language-impaired monolingual children. Rothweiler et al. (2012) suggested that SVA is vulnerable in SLI. The intent of our study was to determine whether TD child L2 learners (cL2) in contrast to children with SLI do not have difficulties with SVA. Many studies report that cL2 acquisition can differ from monolingual (L1) acquisition and that the differences look similar to those of impaired L1 learners, which makes it difficult to distinguish cL2 learners who have SLI from those who do not. If such similarities were to be found in the acquisition of SVA in the two bilingual groups, SVA would be ruled out as a possible marker of SLI in cL2 learners. Three groups of children were compared: six Turkish-German early cL2 learners without SLI, and twelve children with SLI -six monolingual German children and six Turkish-German early cL2 learners. As in Rothweiler et al. (2012), all children were advanced learners and were therefore expected to have acquired SVA. We found that the unimpaired early cL2 learners had indeed successfully acquired SVA. In contrast, neither the monolingual nor the bilingual children with SLI succeeded in reliably producing correct SVA.

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Specific Language Impairment and Early Second Language Acquisition: The Risk of Over- and Underdiagnosis

Cited by 73 publications

References 48 publications

How strong is the ban on non-finite verbs in V2? Evidence from early second language learners of German with and without SLI

How strong is the ban on non-finite verbs in V2? Evidence from early second language learners of German with and without SLI

Methods for Identifying Specific Language Impairment in Bilingual Populations in Germany

Subject-verb agreement in German in bilingual children with and without SLI

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