Bilingual Language Development: Children with typical language development and children with language impairment
Final Report Abstract
It is both practically and theoretically relevant to investigate the validity of using not only language specific, but also crosslinguistic criteria for identifying Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual contexts. The goal of BiLaD was to uncover crosslinguistic ways of identifying language impairment that are independent of the language combinations involved. This led to the validation of crosslinguistic tools for assessing children and provided insight into the underlying nature of developmental language impairment. We systematically investigated data from 234 children in France and Germany. The children in our study had two different target languages (child L2s), French and German, paired with a variety of the same home languages (child L1s), Arabic, Portuguese, and Turkish. Our research design allowed for interesting examination of key variables, notably L1 influence and L1 and L2 linguistic typological similarities as well as sociolinguistic factors in such different immigrant settings. Such a crosslinguistic approach to bilingual language development and SLI furthermore shed light on theoretical approaches to child bilingualism and SLI in highlighting the role of computational complexity. In short, several outcomes of our analyses state that an assessment in the L2 of bilingual children is possible. Children with an L1 heritage language such as Arabic, Turkish and Portuguese, should be assessed with tools adapted and evaluated for bilingual children. First, an evaluation of the language acquisition context and potential risk factors needs an appropriate tool. The PaBiQ (Tuller 2015) was further evaluated and adapted to the German context. Second, Sentence Repetition and Nonword Repetition tasks that are carefully designed with respect to linguistic features appeared as promising tools for assessment in both L2s. Moreover, the extended evaluation of our participants with a variety of normed tests in combination with LITMUS-tasks leads to the conclusion that assessment needs a combination of tools. Finally, the L1 assessment of Turkish and Arabic shed new light on the problem of L1 assessment in (changing) minority language settings‚ especially the limitations of adapting a monolingual (L1) assessment tool for several varieties of Arabic, Portuguese or Turkish to the bilingual migrant setting where these L1s are heritage languages. This project therefore contributed to the understanding of child multilingualism and SLI, with clear implications for relevant teacher training, and for clinical evaluation by speechlanguage therapists.
Publications
- (2016). SLI in Bilinguals: Testing Complex Syntax and Semantics in German. In: David Stringer et al. (ed.), Proceedings of the 13th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2015), 124-135. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project
Lein, T., C. Hamann, M. Rothweiler, L. Abed Ibrahim, S. Chilla & H. Şan
- Syntactic Complexity and Bilingualism: How (a)typical bilinguals deal with complex structures. In: Di Domenico, Elisa (ed.). Syntactic complexity from the language acquisition perspective. CSP, pp 142-177
Hamann, C., S. Chilla, N. Gagarina & L. Abed Ibrahim
- Factors affecting the performance in child heritage Portuguese in Germany. In: Language Acquisition at the Interfaces : Proceedings of GALA 2015 / Jiyoung Choi, Hamida Demirdache, Oana Lungu. Newcastle-upon-Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2018, Seite
Lein, T., M. Rothweiler, & C. Hamann
