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

摘要

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.