Tense and plural formation in Welsh–English bilingual children with and without language impairment

Abstract

By focusing on aspects of morphosyntactic development which are unique to Welsh, we have increased existing about how verbal and nominal morphology are acquired in Welsh-speaking bi-SLI and bi-TD children. The present results point towards productivity problems for Welsh-speaking bi-SLI children who are adversely influenced by low-frequency structures and fail to over-regularize in the context of verbal and nominal concatenating morphology. From a clinical perspective, targeting synthetic past-tense forms through a prompting task may be a promising assessment and intervention tool that future studies could explore further.

Five overarching factors central to grammatical learning and treatment in children with developmental language disorder

“…The second type of past tense structure is less frequent in spoken language but conforms to the typical VSO word order, consisting of the lexical verb with an attached past tense inflection, followed by the subject and the object (e.g., the Welsh equivalent of see‐ PAST girl dog ‘the girl saw the dog’). Chondrogianni and John () tested Welsh–English bilingual children with DLD and age controls on both types of past tense. Although the children with DLD were less accurate than their age mates on both types, the difference was especially striking for items requiring the use of lexical verbs inflected for past tense.…”

The development of English tense and agreement morphology in Welsh–English bilingual children with and without specific language impairment

“…At the same time, the lack of L2 English instruction may place the L2-SLI children in our study at a disadvantage compared to the SLI children in the Canadian study for reasons mentioned above. Moreover, the Welsh-English L2-SLI children in our study also had problems with concatenating morphology in their L1 (Chondrogianni & John, 2018). It seems, thus, that the problems with productive morphology that the L2-SLI_Y children face in their L1 transfer to their L2 (English) and may be accentuated by the lack of intense and lengthy L2 exposure.…”

“…To date, the study by Chondrogianni and John (2018) is the only one to experimentally investigate how tense develops in the L1 Welsh of the same young Welsh-English bilingual children with TLD and SLI also reported here. The authors reported that Welsh-speaking L1-English L2-TLD children had almost ceiling accuracy in the periphrastic form of the past tense and were successfully prompted to produce the less frequent synthetic form of the past tense.…”

“…As such, and given that children with language disorders may benefit more from instructed learning (Ebbels, 2014), the Welsh-English L2-SLI children may perform worse than the L2-SLI children in other studies. From a linguistic viewpoint, Welsh does not mark agreement overtly on present tense lexical verbs; it has a very small set of irregular verbs, and regular past tense formation on lexical verbs is productive, yet problematic for Welsh-speaking children with SLI (Chondrogianni & John, 2018).…”

“…None of the children across the three groups had any history of hearing impairment, attention deficit disorder, autism spectrum disorder, acquired neurological damage, or cognitive deficits. L2 children were included in the language impaired group if they met the following inclusion criteria (see Chondrogianni & John, 2018, for a detailed description of the profile of the L2-SLI group): (a) a formal diagnosis by a professional speech-language therapist (seven children were diagnosed as having SLI and were attending special classes at the time of testing), and (b) a parent/teacher reported history of SLI (all children included in the bilingual SLI group were reported to be late talkers), and/or there were concerns expressed by the parents or a professional school teacher about the child's language development, including speaking and understanding. Children were also classified as being at risk for language impairment if they had low language abilities (-1.25 SD below the younger L2 group mean) across at least two language domains (phonology, vocabulary, and expressive and receptive grammar) in both languages (L1/Welsh and L2/English) using the definition of bilingual SLI as low language abilities across the two languages, not just one (Armon-Lotem & Meir, 2016).…”