Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany

Tuller, Laurice; Hamann, Cornelia; Chilla, Solveig; Ferré, Sandrine; Morin, Eléonore; Pelletier, Philippe; Santos, Christophe dos; Ibrahim, Lina Abed; Zebib, Racha

doi:10.1111/1460-6984.12397

Cited by 90 publications

(103 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Such studies seem to substantiate the claim that exposure is a valid indicator of dominance (in terms of relative proficiency in each language) and has led the author to suggest that exposure can be used as a proxy of language dominance. Others go even further and propose that language dominance is a complex factor, involving proficiency-related components as well as both external (input) and functional (use, context) components ( Montrul, 2015 ; see also de Almeida et al, 2017 ; Hamann and Abed Ibrahim, 2017 ). But on the whole, for the developing languages of a bilingual child, relative proficiency in each language seems to be the principal criterion of language dominance adopted in current research.…”

Section: Language Dominance In Research With Bilingual Speakersmentioning

confidence: 99%

First Language Attrition and Dominance: Same Same or Different?

Köpke

Genevska-Hanke

2018

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We explore the relationship between first language attrition and language dominance, defined here as the relative availability of each of a bilingual’s languages with respect to language processing. We assume that both processes might represent two stages of one and the same phenomenon (Schmid and Köpke, 2017; Köpke, 2018). While many researchers agree that language dominance changes repeatedly over the lifespan (e.g., Silva-Corvalan and Treffers-Daller, 2015), little is known about the precise time scales involved in dominance shifts and attrition. We investigate these time scales in a longitudinal case study of pronominal subject production by a near-native L2-German (semi-null subject and topic-drop but non-pro-drop) and L1-Bulgarian (pro-drop) bilingual speaker with 17 years of residence in Germany. This speaker’s spontaneous speech showed a significantly higher rate of overt pronominal subjects in her L1 than the controls’ rates when tested in Germany. After 3 weeks of L1-reexposure in Bulgaria, however, attrition effects disappeared and the overt subject rate fell within the monolinguals’ range (Genevska-Hanke, 2017). The findings of this first investigation are now compared to those of a second investigation 5 years later, involving data collection in both countries with the result that after 17 years of immigration, no further attrition was attested and the production of overt subjects remained monolingual-like for the data collections in both language environments. The discussion focuses on the factors that are likely to explain these results. First, these show that attrition and language dominance are highly dependent on immediate language use context and change rapidly when the language environment is modified. Additionally, the data obtained after L1-reexposure illustrate that time scales involved in dominance shift or attrition are much shorter than previously thought. Second, the role of age of acquisition in attrition has repeatedly been acknowledged. The present study demonstrates that attrition of a highly entrenched L1 is a phenomenon affecting language processing only temporarily and that it is likely to regress quickly after reexposure or return to balanced L1-use. The discussion suggests that dominance shift and attrition probably involve similar mechanisms and are influenced by the same external factors, showing that both may be different steps of the same process.

show abstract

Section: Language Dominance In Research With Bilingual Speakersmentioning

confidence: 99%

First Language Attrition and Dominance: Same Same or Different?

Köpke

Genevska-Hanke

2018

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In the bilingual acquisition literature, dominance is typically operationalised using either performance-based measures such as mean length of utterance (MLU) or lexical diversity (e.g., Cantone et al, 2008 ) or experiential-based measures such as amount of exposure or country of residence (e.g., Döpke, 1992 ; Argyri and Sorace, 2007 ; Foroodi-Nejad and Paradis, 2009 ; Serratrice et al, 2009 ; Tuller et al, 2018 ). Whilst the former are arguably more objective, they are considerably more time-consuming and consequently more expensive than the latter; experiential-based measures are certainly cheaper and quicker to administer but they are often considered subjective and rather crude in comparison with performance-based measures.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experiential Measures Can Be Used as a Proxy for Language Dominance in Bilingual Language Acquisition Research

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Language dominance is a multidimensional construct comprising several distinct yet interrelated components, including language proficiency, exposure and use. The exact relation between these components remains unclear. Several studies have observed a (non-linear) relationship between bilingual children’s amount of exposure and absolute proficiency in each language, but our understanding of the relationship between language exposure and use and relative proficiency is limited. To address this question, we examined whether experiential-based measures of language dominance, operationalised here in the narrow sense of relative language proficiency, can provide an efficient alternative to the more labor-intensive performance-based measures often used in the literature. In earlier work, Unsworth (a) examined the relationship between relative proficiency and language exposure and use in a group of English–Dutch bilingual preschool children residing in the Netherlands. This study expands these findings by examining Dutch–English preschool children of the same age residing in the United Kingdom in order to cover the full dominance continuum. Participants were 35 simultaneous bilingual children (2;0–5;0) exposed to English and Dutch, 20 resident in the Netherlands and 15 in the United Kingdom. Relative amount of language exposure and use were estimated using a parental questionnaire. To obtain performance-based measures of language proficiency, children’s spontaneous speech was recorded during a half-hour play session in each language. The transcribed data were used to derive MLU (words), average length of the longest five utterances, the number of different verb and noun types. Single word vocabulary comprehension was assessed using standardized tests in both languages. Following Yip and Matthews (2006), relative proficiency was operationalised using differentials. In line with Unsworth (2016a), English-dominant children typically had less than approx. 35% exposure to Dutch and used Dutch less than approximately 30% of the time. Curve-fitting analyses revealed that non-linear models best fit the data. Logistic regression analyses showed that both exposure and use were good predictors of dominance group membership assigned using the same approach as Unsworth (2016a), that is, using SDs. Dominance groups derived independently using cluster analyses overlapped with the groups derived using SDs, confirming that relative amount of exposure and use can be used as a proxy for language dominance.

show abstract

“…Sentence Repetition tasks are widely used to assess morpho-syntactic abilities of monolingual and bilingual children. Sentence Repetition tasks have been shown to be highly effective in discriminating children with typical and atypical language development in monolingual and bilingual populations (e.g., Conti-Ramsden et al, 2001 ; Archibald and Joanisse, 2009 ; Klem et al, 2015 ; Meir et al, 2016 ; Antonijevic et al, 2017 ; Gavarró, 2017 ; Hamann and Abed Ibrahim, 2017 ; Theodorou et al, 2017 ; Fleckstein et al, 2018 ; among many others). In the following subsections, quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the Weaker Language of unbalanced bilinguals are discussed as compared to BB and unbalanced bilinguals in the Dominant Language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morpho-Syntactic Abilities of Unbalanced Bilingual Children: A Closer Look at the Weaker Language

Meir

2018

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Previous studies evaluating morpho-syntactic abilities in the Weaker Language of unbalanced bilingual children are scarce; and they bring inconclusive evidence on the nature of the Weaker Language development. The current study looked into morpho-syntactic profiles of bilingual Russian–Hebrew speaking children in the Weaker Language [the Weaker Heritage Language (HL-Russian) and the Weaker Societal Language (SL-Hebrew)] as compared to balanced bilinguals, unbalanced bilinguals in the Dominant Language and bilinguals with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Four groups of bilingual children aged 5;5–6;5 participated: unbalanced bilinguals with the Weaker HL-Russian and the Dominant SL-Hebrew (HL-weak: n = 39), unbalanced bilinguals with the Weaker SL-Hebrew and the Dominant HL-Russian (SL-weak: n = 19); balanced bilinguals (BB: n = 38), and bilinguals with SLI (biSLI: n = 23). Children’s morpho-syntactic abilities in both languages were investigated using LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Sentence Repetition Tasks (based on Marinis and Armon-Lotem, 2015). Quantitative analysis of morpho-syntactic abilities showed that unbalanced bilinguals scored lower in the Weaker Language as compared to balanced bilinguals and unbalanced bilinguals in the Dominant Language, yet, higher than bilinguals with SLI. Error patterns were similar across bilingual groups with TLD and could be traced to cross-linguistic influence. By contrast, error profiles of unbalanced bilinguals in the Weaker Language and bilinguals with SLI bore fundamental differences. Whereas unbalanced bilinguals in the Weaker Language opted for complex structures, relying on the available resources from the Dominant Language; bilinguals with SLI simplified complex syntactic structures. To conclude, the study shows that the Weaker Language of unbalanced bilinguals with TLD develop qualitatively similarly to the languages of balanced bilinguals and the Dominant Language in unbalanced bilinguals, albeit delayed or influenced by the Dominant Language to a larger extent. Conversely, the study brings evidence that linguistic profiles of unbalanced bilinguals with TLD in the Weaker Language and bilinguals with SLI differ, pointing at a deviant pattern of acquisition in children with SLI.

show abstract

Identifying language impairment in bilingual children in France and in Germany

Abstract: NWR and SR tasks informed by linguistic theory are appropriate for use as part of the diagnostic process for identifying language impairment in bilingual children for whom the language of assessment is different from the home language, in diverse sociolinguistic contexts.

Cited by 90 publications

References 33 publications

First Language Attrition and Dominance: Same Same or Different?

First Language Attrition and Dominance: Same Same or Different?

Experiential Measures Can Be Used as a Proxy for Language Dominance in Bilingual Language Acquisition Research

Morpho-Syntactic Abilities of Unbalanced Bilingual Children: A Closer Look at the Weaker Language

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About