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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2011

MONIKA ROTHWEILER ,
SOLVEIG CHILLA  and
HARALD CLAHSEN
MONIKA ROTHWEILER*
Affiliation:
University of Bremen
SOLVEIG CHILLA
Affiliation:
University of Erfurt
HARALD CLAHSEN
Affiliation:
University of Potsdam
*
Address for correspondence: Monika Rothweiler, University of Bremen, FB12, Bibliothekstrasse 1, D-28359 Bremen, Germany[email protected]
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Abstract

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 child's performance in one of her two languages.

Keywords

verb morphologytense deficitagreement deficitTurkish–German SLI
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Special Issue 1: Bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment , January 2012 , pp. 39 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

The research presented here was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, ‘German Research Council’), through a grant to HC for a research project on monolingual children with SLI at the University of Düsseldorf (SPP ‘Language Acquisition’, 1986–1991) and a grant to MR for a research project on bilingual children with SLI at the University of Hamburg (SFB 538 ‘Multilingualism’, 2002–2011).

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