Monika Rothweiler

Subject–verb agreement in Specific Language Impairment: A study of monolingual and bilingual German-speaking children

This study investigates phenomena that have been claimed to be indicative of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German, focusing on subject–verb agreement marking. Longitudinal data from fourteen German-speaking children with SLI, seven monolingual and seven Turkish–German successive bilingual children, were examined. We found similar patterns of impairment in the two participant groups. Both the monolingual and the bilingual children with SLI had correct (present vs. preterit) tense marking and produced syntactically complex sentences such as embedded clauses and wh-questions, but were limited in reliably producing correct agreement-marked verb forms. These contrasts indicate that agreement marking is impaired in German-speaking children with SLI, without any necessary concurrent deficits in either the CP-domain or in tense marking. Our results also show that it is possible to identify SLI from an early successive bilingual childs performance in one of her two languages.

Dissociations in SLI children's inflectional systems. A study of participle inflection and subject-verb agreement

This paper presents results from a study of the acquisition of participles and subject-verb-agreement (SVA) in impaired and unimpaired monolingual German-speaking children. In earlier studies, we characterized specific language impairment (SLI) as a selective deficit of an otherwise normally developed linguistic system. We argued that the specific deficits of SLI children are restricted to inflectional morphology, and, in particular, that these children have problems establishing grammatical agreement relations. Consequently, we expected that the acquisition of participle morphology should not be impaired in SLI children, since German participle inflection does not involve grammatical agreement. The results of this study confirm that while SVA morphology is considerably affected in SLI, participle morphology is not impaired.

Inflectional rules in children’s grammars: evidence from German participles

In recent studies on the acquisition of inflectional morphology in English much debate has centred around the question whether children’s overregularization errors, such as goed instead of went result from a morphological rule or from a connectionist network such as the one suggested by Rumelhart and McClelland (1986). Pinker and Prince (1992) and Marcus et al. (1992) have argued that the -ed affix has the status of a symbolic rule in the children’s grammars which is qualitatively distinct from an associative memory for irregulars. However, researchers such as Marchman and Bates (1991) and MacWhinney and Leinbach (1992) have disputed the existence of such symbolic rules and suggested that overregularizations are effects of associative networks: In English, the -ed affix has much higher type frequencies than the irregular past tense forms, and is therefore preferred in children’s inflectional errors.

Linguistic markers of specific language impairment in bilingual children: the case of verb morphology.

Abstract This study investigates verbal morphology in Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German, focusing on past participle inflection. Longitudinal data from 12 German-speaking children with SLI, six monolingual and six Turkish–German sequential bilingual children, were examined, plus an additional group of six typically developing Turkish–German sequential bilingual children. In a recent study (Rothweiler, M., Chilla, S., & H. Clahsen. (2012). Subject verb agreement in Specific Language Impairment: A study of monolingual and bilingual German-speaking children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 39–57), the same children with SLI were found to be severely impaired in reliably producing correct agreement-marked verb forms. By contrast, the new results reported in this study show that both the monolingual and the bilingual children with SLI produce participle inflection according to their language age. Our results strengthen the case of difficulties with agreement as a linguistic marker of SLI in German and show that it is possible to identify SLI from an early sequential bilingual child’s performance in one of her two languages.

Specific language impairment in Turkish: Evidence from case morphology in Turkish–German successive bilinguals

Language disorders, and Specific Language Impairment (SLI), have been extensively studied in a number of different, though thus far almost exclusively Indoeuropean, languages. For other languages such as Turkish, Vietnamese, or Arabic, however, findings on the outcome of SLI are rare. In this context, the growing number of migrant children in European countries with a variety of first languages can be seen as a challenge to linguistics and to language assessment: The lack of empirical findings on SLI in these languages brings up the question of how the impairment is manifested in bilingual children with a migrant background. In order for a language disorder to correctly be labelled SLI, it needs to be identified in both languages. This paper presents findings from a study examining the grammatical features of Turkish first language acquisition in Germany, while focusing on Turkish case morphology. For this purpose, it compares the data of three typically-developing children and two children with deviant language development. Moreover, it presents a first interpretation of the outcome of grammatical SLI in bilingual Turkish children and discusses suggestions for diagnostic assessment procedures.

Bilingualer Spracherwerb und Zweitspracherwerb

Mehrsprachigkeit und Multi- oder Interkulturalitat sind Begriffe, die aus aktuellen gesellschaftspolitischen Debatten nicht wegzudenken sind. Fast taglich gibt es neue Diskussionsbeitrage und Schlagzeilen dazu, die PISA-Ergebnisse schrecken Padagogen und Politiker auf: Kinder mit Migrationshintergrund haben besonders schlechte Bildungschancen und nicht ausreichende Sprachkenntnisse werden als eine Ursache des Ubels ausgemacht. Es ist kaum noch moglich, sich einen vollstandigen Uberblick uber Sprachforderprogramme, Sprachstandsverfahren und Fortbildungen fur Erzieher/innen und Lehrer/innen zu verschaffen, die in den letzten Jahren auf den padagogischen Markt geworfen wurden (vgl. Jampert et al. 2005). Den Verantwortlichen in Ministerien, Sozial- und Schulbehorden wird deutlich, dass Deutschland nicht (mehr?) einsprachig ist. Eine neue Sensibilitat fur Zweioder Mehrsprachigkeit, vor allem fur kindliche Mehrsprachigkeit, sit erwacht. (Die Begriffe ›Zweisprachigkeit‹ und ›Mehrsprachigkeit‹ werden in der Regel gleichbedeutend verwendet, denn der Erwerb einer dritten oder vierten Sprache erfolgt im Prinzip genauso wie der Erwerb einer zweiten Sprache.)

Testing the phonemes relevant for German verb morphology in hard-of-hearing children: The FinKon-test

Many hard-of-hearing children show delays or disorders in the acquisition of morphology and syntax. There is an on-going discussion how these difficulties are connected to problems in the auditory domain. The article focuses on coronal consonants that function as suffixes in the German verbal inflectional system. Here we present a new test we developed to evaluate the ability to discriminate these consonants in syllabic offset positions. A pilot study with 22 hearing-impaired (HI) children and 15 typically developing (TD) children reveals significantly lower discrimination scores in the HI group. The results highlight the necessity to measure the capacity to distinguish particular phonemes at specific syllable positions, when considering the impact of a hearing impairment on language acquisition.

Critical periods and SLI

The language acquisition device endows human beings with the ability to acquire one or more first languages as long as some relevant conditions like amount and quality of input are fulfilled and the onset of acquisition is early enough. One of Meisel’s merits not only in his target article for this volume of ZS, but also in Meisel (2007, 2008) and other papers lies in identifying factors relevant for distinguishing between the nature of first and second language acquisition and developing a language acquisition account that allows for the integration of results on first language acquisition and simultaneous acquisition of two or more languages, as well as the successive acquisition of a second language in children and adults. In his target article, Meisel concentrates on the impact of the results from the study on successive language acquisition in children on the topic of multiple sensitive or optimal phases and aims at identifying the relevant features of child L2. The central concepts in his account are the maturational changes in the language making capacity (LMC) (based on maturational changes in the neural system), age of onset of acquisition (AOA) and the grammatical properties of language that are affected by the maturational changes of the LMC/LAD (language acquisition device). Meisel argues for at least two critical periods for grammar acquisition, one around the age of 4 and another between the ages of 6 and 7. During these periods, phases that are optimal for the acquisition of certain grammatical sub-components start to fade out. Various proposals with respect to these subcomponents are discussed in recent studies on child L2 (cL2) (cf. Schwartz 2004, Blom et al. 2006, Rothweiler 2006, among others). According to Meisel, inflectional morphology is subject to change very early in the LMC (around age 4), whereas most parts of syntax seem to be affected later. The different onsets of the fading out of optimal phases thus result in an unbalanced development in the second language compared to L1 acquisition. Meisel presents evidence that supports this pro-

Comparing Specific Language Impairment and Hearing Impairment: Different Profiles in German Verbal Agreement Morphology

ABSTRACT The study aims at identifying characteristic phenotypes for children with SLI and children with sensorineural hearing impairment (HI) in language and in domains associated with language. We focus on verbal agreement inflection and phonological short-term memory, phenomena that have been repeatedly found to be impaired in both groups of children. A nonword repetition task and an elicitation task on subject-verb agreement were conducted with three groups of monolingual German children: (i) 11 children with SLI, (ii) 10 children with HI (hearing loss between 38 and 75 dB) and hearing aids, and (iii) 10 typically developing children. Data analyses reveal quantitatively and qualitatively different performance patterns with respect to verbal agreement inflection in children with SLI and children with HI but no different patterns for nonword repetition. Our results not only identify deficits in verbal agreement inflection as a sensitive, specific, and selective clinical marker for SLI in German, but they also shed some light on the nature of the deficits that underlie SLI.

Inflectional morphology in German hearing-impaired children

Despite modern hearing aids, children with hearing impairment often have only restricted access to spoken language input during the ‘critical’ years for language acquisition. Specifically, a sensorineural hearing impairment affects the perception of voiceless coronal consonants which realize verbal affixes in German. The aim of this study is to explore if German hearing-impaired children have problems in producing and/or acquiring inflectional suffixes expressed by such phonemes. The findings of two experiments (an elicitation task and a picture-naming task) conducted with a group of hearing-impaired monolingual German children (age 3–4 years) demonstrate that difficulties in perceiving specific phonemes relate to the avoidance of these same sounds in speech production independent of the grammatical function these phonemes have.