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

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.

How strong is the ban on non-finite verbs in V2? Evidence from early second language learners of German with and without SLI

“…5 To date, research on eL2 SLI acquisition of German is scarce. Findings from the analysis of spontaneous speech samples of seven eL2 children with SLI indicate that verbal morphology for SVA is problematic up to age 8, with targetlike inflection reaching only 74 % overall (Rothweiler et al 2012;Rothweiler et al this volume). Note that in these studies bare forms and -en were classified as potentially non-finite.…”

“…Target-like verbal morphology for marking SVA is rather low, e.g., around 70 % in a group of six 5-to 8-year-old monolinguals with SLI studied by Clahsen (1991) (for further analyses of the same children, cf. Clahsen et al [1997]; Rothweiler et al [2012]; Rothweiler et al [this volume]). The SLI children used bare forms most frequently (59 %), followed by substitutions, i.e.…”

“…incorrect uses of finite forms (31 %), and by en-infinitives (10 %). To account for this data, Clahsen and colleagues proposed the Agreement Deficit Hypothesis (ADH) which states that children with SLI, monolingual or bilingual, have difficulty with grammatical morphology like SVA (for German : Clahsen 1991;Rothweiler et al 2012;Rothweiler et al this volume;for English: Clahsen et al 1997). Rephrasing the ADH within a minimalist framework, Clahsen et al (1997) state that phi-features on verbs, i.e.…”

“…In previous acquisition research, the difference between bare forms and en-infinitives has been neglected. Both bare forms and en-infinitives have been analyzed as "potentially non-finite" (Rothweiler et al 2012), or bare forms have been excluded from analysis due to ambiguity between finite and non-finite (Clahsen et al 1997). Bare forms have also been argued to be covertly marked for finiteness, while en-infinitives were analyzed as non-finite (Prévost 2003).…”

“…This is important, because modals and auxiliaries as well as possessive have and be have been argued to behave differently from lexical verbs and to be less affected in SLI (e.g., Clahsen 1991;Wexler 1994). Some analyses included lexical verbs, modals, and auxiliaries except for be (Clahsen et al 1997;Rothweiler et al 2012), others examined lexical and functional verbs separately (Prévost 2003).…”