Childhood bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment: A study of the CP-domain in German SLI

Tobias Ruberg,Monika Rothweiler,Harald Clahsen,João Veríssimo

doi:10.1017/s1366728919000580

Abstract

AbstractThis study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish–German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, ‘vulnerability of the CP-domain’ is not.

Highlights

An increasing number of children are growing up bilingually
We investigate whether linguistic markers of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German that have been proposed for monolingual children hold for bilingual children with SLI
The model made use of treatment contrasts, which allowed obtaining the main comparison of interest, namely, SLI-L2 vs. TD-L2

Summary

Introduction

An increasing number of children are growing up bilingually. Assuming that monolingual and bilingual children are affected by developmental language impairment, the number of bilingual children with language impairment is likely to increase as well. The combination of bilingualism and developmental language impairment in the same individual raises a number of issues for both research and clinical practice. From the perspective of bilingualism research, for example, we may ask whether and if so how a bilingual child’s language development is affected by language impairment. From the perspective of research on language impairment, we may ask whether and if so how growing up with more than one language influences a child’s language impairment. Developmental language impairment in bilingual children brings up practical concerns for diagnosis and intervention. Given the heterogeneity of these children’s language background, an important question for clinical practice is whether it is possible to identify a bilingual child as language impaired from assessing one of her languages, e.g., in the case of bilingual German-speaking children with Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Russian, or Kurdish as L1, from their German

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