Knowing versus producing

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitta Keij ◽  
Leonie Cornips ◽  
Roeland van Hout ◽  
Aafke Hulk ◽  
Joanne van Emmerik
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Gender Paradigm ◽  
Dutch Children

Dutch nouns are divided into two groups according to grammatical gender which is, among others, marked on the definite determiner: common nouns take the definite determiner de and neuter nouns take the definite determiner het. This study is unique in systematically investigating the acquisition of grammatical gender and the definite determiner in the production and knowledge data of the same Dutch children. Three groups of children were examined: (i) typically developing monolinguals (L1-TD: 6;7—9;11), (ii) monolinguals with Specific Language Impairment (L1-SLI: 8;4-12;0), and (iii) typically developing bilinguals, who are early second language learners (eL2: 6;7-10;0). The three groups of children reveal different stages in discovering that de and het cover the gender paradigm. At comparable ages, the L1-TD children have completed this paradigm discovery; however, the eL2 children have not yet completed it, and the L1- SLI children are only at the first stage of the discovery of the gender paradigm.

Markedness in Right-edge Syllabification: Parallels across Populations

2002 ◽  
Vol 47 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 151-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Goad
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Emergent Property ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
The Right

AbstractThe position that languages require both coda and onset options for the syllabification of word-final consonants is adopted. The latter option is further divided into languages where final consonants are onsets of empty-headed syllables and those where final consonants are syllabified through onset-nuclear (ON) sharing. ON sharing is reserved for languages where final consonants display fortition (overt release): the nucleus hosts the release of the consonant. Empirical evidence from across populations demonstrates that ON sharing is unmarked. It is favoured among the outputs of first and second language learners and individuals with Specific Language Impairment. It is further argued that final onsets are optimal for parsing in end-state grammars, as they demarcate the right word-edge more effectively than codas. Among the two types of onsets, ON sharing is preferred: through the nuclear release, it is better able to host the range of contrasts that right-edge onsets display. The parsing argument serves to illustrate how ON sharing provides an advantage to end-state grammars, beyond being an emergent property from acquisition.

scholarly journals Comprehension and production of French object clitics by child second language learners and children with specific language impairment

2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
THERES GRÜTER
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Matching Task ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Object Clitics ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Error Profiles

The objective of this research was to compare child second language (L2) learners and children with specific language impairment (SLI) on both production and comprehension in order to investigate whether the similarity of their error profiles observed in spontaneous production extends to comprehension. Results are presented from an elicited production and a sentence–picture matching task targeting accusative object clitics in French. As groups, both L2 learners and children with SLI show a low rate of clitic suppliance in production, yet perform well on the comprehension task. No statistically significant differences are found between the two groups on either task. Analyses of individual results, however, reveal diversity within both groups. Although there seems to be a correlation between performance in production and comprehension in the L2 group, this is not the case in the SLI group.

scholarly journals Production and Processing of Subject–Verb Agreement in Monolingual Dutch Children With Specific Language Impairment

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 952-965 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elma Blom ◽  
Nada Vasić ◽  
Jan de Jong
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Typical Development ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Test Sensitivity ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Listening Task ◽  
Dutch Children

Purpose In this study, the authors investigated whether errors with subject–verb agreement in monolingual Dutch children with specific language impairment (SLI) are influenced by verb phonology. In addition, the productive and receptive abilities of Dutch acquiring children with SLI regarding agreement inflection were compared. Method An SLI group (6–8 years old), an age-matched group with typical development, and a language-matched, younger, typically developing (TD) group participated in the study. Using an elicitation task, the authors tested use of third person singular inflection after verbs that ended in obstruents (plosive, fricative) or nonobstruents (sonorant). The authors used a self-paced listening task to test sensitivity to subject–verb agreement violations. Results Omission was more frequent after obstruents than nonobstruents; the younger TD group used inflection less often after plosives than fricatives, unlike the SLI group. The SLI group did not detect subject–verb agreement violations if the ungrammatical structure contained a frequent error (omission), but if the ungrammatical structure contained an infrequent error (substitution), subject–verb agreement violations were noticed. Conclusions The use of agreement inflection by children with TD or SLI is affected by verb phonology. Differential effects in the 2 groups are consistent with a delayed development in Dutch SLI. Parallels between productive and receptive abilities point to weak lexical agreement inflection representations in Dutch SLI.

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

2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Petra Schulz ◽  
Rabea Schwarze
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Standardized Test ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Verb Placement

AbstractUsing 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;

scholarly journals Grammatical Gender in Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from Determiner-Noun Contexts in Greek

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Spyridoula Varlokosta ◽  
Michaela Nerantzini
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Lexical Information ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Feminine Gender

Τhe present study investigates whether Greek-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) face difficulties in the acquisition of gender in determiner-noun contexts, as expressed via agreement οn the determiner. The results of an elicitation task with real and novel nouns showed that children with SLI (a) show difficulties primarily with masculine and feminine gender marking, and do not use prototypicality of the noun suffix, as typically developing children do, to mark the gender on the determiner in conditions with real nouns, and (b) do not use, with the same consistency as typically developing children do, the noun ending as a cue to mark the gender value on the determiner in conditions with novel nouns. It is argued that although grammatical gender is considered an intrinsic lexical property of the noun, it is not learned by children with SLI along with other lexical features of the noun. Moreover, when lexical information is not provided in the nouns, children with SLI cannot process morphology cues, such as the inflectional suffixes on the nouns, as consistently as typically developing children do.

scholarly journals Evaluating maturational parallels in second language children and children with specific language impairment

2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mabel L. Rice
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Chronological Age ◽  
Growth Trajectories ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
English Speaking

In her Keynote Article in this issue, Paradis explores the nature of bilingual language acquisition by examining the question of possible similarities between children learning a second language (L2) and children with specific language impairment (SLI) who are monolingual or bilingual. She evaluates the maturation model of Rice (2004), the extended optional infinitive (EOI) model, that focuses on children's acquisition of finiteness marking during the early childhood period. Paradis alludes to the issue of how to deal with the nonparallels between chronological age and acquisition in the comparison of L2 and SLI language acquisition within maturational models. I explore that issue further in this Commentary, using the available growth templates drawn from the work on English-speaking typically developing children and children with SLI for projected possible growth trajectories for bilingual and L2 children, with and without SLI.

Sources of individual differences in the acquisition of tense inflection by English second language learners with and without specific language impairment

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 953-976 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELMA BLOM ◽  
JOHANNE PARADIS
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
Mixed Regression ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Classification Procedures ◽  
Learning English

ABSTRACTThe goal of this study was to investigate whether individual difference factors influence the second language (L2) learning of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical development (TD) differently. The study focuses on tense inflection development in English L2 children. The roles of age of L2 acquisition, length of L2 exposure, and first language (L1) were examined. Twenty-four pairs of 4- and 5-year-old English L2 children with SLI and English L2 children with TD participated in the study. Children's responses on the third person singular and regular past tense probes of the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 2001) were analyzed using logistic mixed regression modeling and classification procedures. For all children, those who started learning English later performed better than children who started learning English earlier, but the advantage of an older age of acquisition was particularly present in the L2 with SLI group. For children in the L2 group with TD, their accuracy with tense inflection clearly increased with longer L2 exposure, but this was not found for the L2 children with SLI. Finally, L2 children with TD were better able to transfer L1 knowledge than L2 children with SLI.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document