French-English Bilingual Children With SLI

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanne Paradis ◽  
Martha Crago ◽  
Fred Genesee ◽  
Mabel Rice
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
French Speaking

The goal of this study was to determine whether bilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI) are similar to monolingual age mates with SLI, in each language. Eight French-English bilingual children with SLI were compared to agematched monolingual children with SLI, both English and French speaking, with respect to their use of morphosyntax in language production. Specifically, using the extended optional infinitive (EOI) framework, the authors examined the children’s use of tense-bearing and non-tense-bearing morphemes in obligatory context in spontaneous speech. Analyses revealed that the patterns predicted by the EOI framework were borne out for both the monolingual and bilingual children with SLI: The bilingual and monolingual children with SLI showed greater accuracy with non-tense than with tense morphemes. Furthermore, the bilingual and monolingual children with SLI had similar mean accuracy scores for tense morphemes, indicating that the bilingual children did not exhibit more profound deficits in the use of these grammatical morphemes than their monolingual peers. In sum, the bilingual children with SLI in this study appeared similar to their monolingual peers for the aspects of grammatical morphology examined in each language. These bilingual-monolingual similarities point to the possibility that SLI may not be an impediment to learning two languages, at least in the domain of grammatical morphology.

Grammatical Morphology and the Role of Weak Syllables in the Speech of Italian-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 1363-1374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Umberta Bortolini
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
Input Processing ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Verb Inflections

Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to a group of younger control children in their use of auxiliary verbs, pronominal clitics, infinitives, present tense verb inflections, and articles. Differences favoring the control children were found for those morphemes that required the production of nonfinal weak syllables. On other grammatical morphemes, the two groups did not differ. A relationship was seen between the use of morphemes requiring nonfinal weak syllables and the use of nonfinal weak syllables that had no morpheme status. The findings are considered from the perspective of both prosodic production limitations and limitations in input processing.

Grammatical Morphology Deficits in Spanish-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 905-924 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Bedore ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Clinical Markers ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Third Person

The focus of this study was the use of grammatical morphology by Spanish-speaking preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI). Relative to both same-age peers and younger typically developing children with similar mean lengths of utterance (MLUs), the children with SLI showed more limited use of several different grammatical morphemes. These limitations were most marked for noun-related morphemes such as adjective-agreement inflections and direct object clitics. Most errors on the part of children in all groups consisted of substitutions of a form that shared most but not all of the target’s grammatical features (e.g., correct tense and number but incorrect person). Number errors usually involved singular forms used in plural contexts; person errors usually involved third person forms used in first person contexts. The pattern of limitations of the children with SLI suggests that, for languages such as Spanish, additional factors might have to be considered in the search for clinical markers for this disorder. Implications for evaluation and treatment of language disorders in Spanish-speaking children are also discussed.

Some influences on the grammar of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment

1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Letizia Sabbadini ◽  
Virginia Volterra ◽  
Jeanette S. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Speech Production ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Surface Characteristics ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Syntactic Differences

ABSTRACTThe spontaneous speech of both English-speaking (E) and Italian-speaking (I) children with specific language impairment (SLI) was examined to determine (a) whether phonological factors influence the grammatical morpheme use of ISLI children, as has been found for ESLI children, and (b) whether ESLI and ISLI children show similar syntactic abilities at the same level of mean utterance length as measured in words. The results indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced the ISLI children's tendency to use articles – the only Italian grammatical morphemes in which word-final consonants are required. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the ESLI and ISLI children. However, both groups of children seemed to have a problem using morphemes that constituted unstressed elements in a sentence even though the grammatical and semantic function of these elements varied across the two languages. The findings suggest that a speech production or perception component may be playing a greater role than previously believed in contributing to SLI children's well-documented expressive grammatical difficulties, though the specific effects of this factor will vary as a function of the surface characteristics of the language being acquired.

Grammatical Morphology and Speech Perception in Children With Specific Language Impairment

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 1076-1085 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Karla K. McGregor ◽  
George D. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Speech Stream ◽  
Speech Stimuli ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Performance Profiles

Many English-speaking children with specific language impairment have been found to be especially weak in their use of grammatical morphology. In a separate literature, many children meeting the same subject description have shown significant limitations on tasks involving the perception of rapid acoustic changes. In this study, we attempted to determine whether there were parallels between the grammatical morphological limitations of children with specific language impairment and their performance profiles across several perceptual contrasts. Because most English grammatical morphemes have shorter durations relative to adjacent morphemes in the speech stream, we hypothesized that children with specific language impairment would be especially weak in discriminating speech stimuli whose contrastive portions had shorter durations than the noncontrastive portions. Results from a group of eight children with specific language impairment with documented morphological difficulties confirmed these predictions. Several possible accounts of the observed morphology-perception parallels are offered.

scholarly journals Dwujęzyczność u progu edukacji szkolnej – interdyscyplinarny projekt badawczy

Neofilolog ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 7-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Otwinowska ◽  
Natalia Banasik ◽  
Marta Białecka-Pikul ◽  
Dorota Kiebzak-Mandera ◽  
Katarzyna Kuś ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Bilingual Child ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
European Cooperation ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
School Entrance ◽  
Natural Settings

The paper describes a Polish research project which aims at creating a cognitive and linguistic profile of the Polish-English bilingual child at the school entrance age. With the increase in the number of bilingual children due to economic migrations, researchers, educators and practitioners are often faced with diagnostic dilemmas which arise from similarities in bilingual language acquisition in natural settings and Specific Language Impairment (SLI). The study, which aims at disentangling the effects of bilingualism from those of SLI, is a part of European cooperation programme COST Action IS0408/Bi-SLI. The aim of the Polish team is to create and test a set of tools which can be used for developing norms of typical bilingual development for Polish-English children entering school education.

scholarly journals Cross-Linguistic Cognate Production in Spanish–English Bilingual Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 619-633 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie M. Grasso ◽  
Elizabeth D. Peña ◽  
Lisa M. Bedore ◽  
J. Gregory Hixon ◽  
Zenzi M. Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
English Bilingual

Profiles of Grammatical Morphology and Sentence Imitation in Children With Specific Language Impairment and Down Syndrome

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 720-732 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. A. Eadie ◽  
M. E. Fey ◽  
J. M. Douglas ◽  
C. L. Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Down Syndrome ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Composite Measures ◽  
Grammatical Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Sentence Imitation ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance

The purpose of the present study was to examine the grammatical morphology and sentence imitation performance of two different groups of children with language impairment and to compare their performance with that of children learning language typically. Expressive use of tense-bearing and non-tenserelated grammatical morphemes was explored. Children with specific language impairment (SLI), with Down syndrome (DS), and with typical language development (TL) were matched on mean length of utterance (MLU). Performance was compared primarily on composite measures of tense, tense inflections, and nontense morphemes, as well as on the Sentences subtest of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence—Revised (WPPSI-R; D. Wechsler, 1989). Exploratory analyses were completed on a set of 11 individual grammatical morphemes as a follow-up to the principal analyses. As predicted, the children with SLI performed significantly more poorly than the children with TL on all three composite measures. In addition, the DS group exhibited significantly weaker performance than did the TL group on the tense inflections and non-tense morpheme composites. Although there were no statistically reliable differences between the SLI and DS groups on any morpheme measure, the groups were not comparably weak in their use of the regular past, -ed; the irregular third person singular morphemes (e.g., has, does); the present progressive, -ing; or the use of modals. The SLI and DS groups both performed more poorly than did the TL group on the sentence imitation task.

Functional Categories in the Grammars of Children With Specific Language Impairment

1995 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 1270-1283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence B. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Closed Class ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Verb Inflections

Children with specific language impairment often show a serious limitation in their use of grammatical morphemes such as verb inflections and free-standing closed-class forms. The purpose of this study was to determine whether such difficulty constitutes a problem with entire functional categories. Examination of the spontaneous speech of a group of 10 English-speaking children with specific language impairment revealed clear evidence of each of the functional categories examined: Determiner, Inflection, and Complementizer. However, relative to younger normally developing children with comparable mean utterance lengths, these children showed lower percentages of use of many of the grammatical elements associated with these functional categories. The utility of employing a functional category framework in the study of specific language impairment and the implications of the findings for other accounts of this disorder are discussed.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document