The acquisition of tense morphology over time by English second language children with specific language impairment: Testing the cumulative effects hypothesis

Abstract

The cumulative effects hypothesis (CEH) claims that bilingual development would be a challenge for children with specific language impairment (SLI). To date, research on second language (L2) children with SLI has been limited mainly to their early years of L2 exposure; however, examining the long-term outcomes of L2 children with SLI is essential for testing the CEH. Accordingly, the present study examined production and grammaticality judgments of English tense morphology from matched groups of L2 children with SLI and L2 children with typical development (TD) for 3 years, from ages 8 to 10 with 4-6 years of exposure to English. This study found that the longitudinal acquisition profile of the L2 children with SLI and TD was similar to the acquisition profile reported for monolinguals with SLI and TD. Furthermore, L2-SLI children's accuracy with tense morphology was similar to that of their monolingual age peers with SLI at the end of the study, and exceeded that of younger monolingual peers with SLI whose age matched the L2 children's length of exposure to English. These findings are not consistent with the CEH, but instead show that morphological acquisition parallel to monolinguals with SLI is possible for L2 children with SLI.

Changes in English Past Tense Use by Bilingual School-Age Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

“…Reported outcomes for preschool and early schoolage bilingual children with DLD showed the same sequence of grammatical development as monolingual English children with DLD (Rice et al, 2000), albeit at a slower pace (Salameh et al, 2004). A similar regular-irregular past tense profile was also reported for seven children with DLD from varied L1 backgrounds (Paradis et al, 2017). In this study, L2 English speakers with DLD were matched to monolingual English speakers with DLD having the same number of years of English exposure.…”

“…In this study, L2 English speakers with DLD were matched to monolingual English speakers with DLD having the same number of years of English exposure. Over a period of 3 years, children with DLD (aged 8-10 years) showed consistent improvement on regular past tense, but the development of irregular past tense was protracted (Paradis et al, 2017). At the study's conclusion, bilingual children with DLD differed from their peers only with respect to irregular verbs.…”

“…Notably, the bilingual children with DLD performed better than the younger monolingual children with DLD on regular past tense verbs. Reported negative outcomes for bilingual children's grammatical development have been attributed to the inclusion of children having fewer than 3 years of exposure to English (Paradis et al, 2017).…”

“…Most existing studies focus on young bilingual children with TD (Bohman et al, 2010;Collins et al, 2014;Hoff et al, 2012;Rojas & Iglesias, 2013). Fewer address changes in bilingual children who also have DLD (Gillam, Peña, Bedore, Bohman, & Mendez-Perez, 2013;Gutiérrez-Clellen, Simon-Cereijido, & Sweet, 2012;Paradis, Jia, & Arppe, 2017;Salameh, Håkansson, & Nettelbladt, 2004). Moreover, the chief focus has been on bilingual children attending majority language immersion programs to the near exclusion of those receiving bilingual instruction.…”

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

“…factors (age of acquisition, length of exposure, and proficiency) and language-or itemspecific properties (morphophonology and frequency) influence the acquisition outcomes (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011;Marinis & Chondrogianni, 2010;Paradis, 2011), they do not inform us about how accuracy and error types in L2 children change over time as a function of child-internal and language-specific properties. To date, only two studies by Paradis and colleagues have investigated how tense and agreement morphology develop over time from the age of 5 to 7 (Blom, Paradis, & Duncan, 2012) and from the age of 8 to 10 years (Paradis, Jia & Arppe, 2017) in children from diverse first language (L1) backgrounds or in children with the same L1 (Chinese) . The present study builds on this line of research by examining how Welsh L1-English L2-TLD children attending Welsh-medium schools acquire English past tense and agreement morphology from an early school age, when the children are 4 years old, into older primary school age, when they are 9 years old, in a cross-sectional study design.…”