Developmental language disorder in sequential bilinguals: Characterising word properties in spontaneous speech.

The current study sought to investigate whether word properties can facilitate the identification of developmental language disorder (DLD) in sequential bilinguals by analyzing properties in nouns and verbs in L2 spontaneous speech as potential DLD markers. Measures of semantic (imageability, concreteness), lexical (frequency, age of acquisition) and phonological (phonological neighbourhood, word length) properties were computed for nouns and verbs produced by 15 sequential bilinguals (5;7) with DLD and 15 age-matched controls with diverse L1 backgrounds. Linear mixed modelling revealed a significant interaction of group and word category on phonological neighbourhood values but no differences across imageability, concreteness, frequency, age of acquisition, and word length measures in spontaneous speech. Outcomes suggest that group-level differences may not be apparent at the word-level, due to the heterogeneous nature of DLD and potential similarities in production during early L2 acquisition.

Validation of a Greek Sentence Repetition Task with Typically Developing Monolingual and Bilingual Children.

This study provides a preliminary validation of a Greek Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) with a sample of 110 monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TLD) children and examines the test's ability to distinguish between Greek monolingual children and age-matched Albanian-Greek bilinguals using a Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis. This is the first study to report on the psychometric evaluation of a Greek SRT and its discriminatory ability with typical populations. Since most language assessments are standardized with monolinguals and bilingual children tend to underperform on these compared to monolinguals, it is essential to establish the level of bilingual TLD children's ability on the same tests before moving on to diagnose language impairment in bilinguals. Results showed that the Greek SRT had very high validity and reliability scores, with Accuracy measures being more reliable than Grammaticality measures. The school-age monolingual and bilingual TLD children reached different cut-off scores on this task.

Comprehension of Welcher-Questions in German-Speaking Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder.

Purpose This study examined whether monolingual German-speaking preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were facilitated by the presence of case-marking cues in their interpretation of German subject and object welcher ("which")-questions, as reported for their typically developing peers. We also examined whether knowledge of case-marking and/or phonological working memory modulated children's ability to revise early assigned interpretations of ambiguous questions. Method Sixty-three monolingual German-speaking children with and without DLD aged between 4;0 and 5;11 (years;months) participated in an offline picture selection task targeting the comprehension of welcher-questions in German. We manipulated question type (subject, object), case-marking transparency, and case-marking position within the question (sentence-initial/-final). Results The typically developing children outperformed the children with DLD across conditions, and all children performed better on subject than on object wh-questions. Transparent and early cues elicited higher accuracy than late-arriving cues. For the DLD children, their working memory capacity explained their inability to revise early assigned interpretations to ambiguous questions, whereas their knowledge of case did not. Conclusions The results suggest that disambiguating morphosyntactic cues can only partly facilitate comprehension of German welcher-questions in children with DLD, whose poor phonological working memory rather than their knowledge of case-marking mediates performance on these structures.

Effects of parental input quality in child heritage language acquisition.

This study investigates the role of parental input quality on the acquisition of Greek as a heritage language in Western Canada. Focusing on subject use, we tested four groups of Greek speakers: monolingual children, heritage children, and the parents of each one of those groups. Participants completed an elicited production task designed to elicit subject placement in wide focus and embedded interrogative contexts, where postverbal subjects are preferred/required in the monolingual variety. Results gave rise to two main conclusions: first, the parental input received by heritage children may be qualitatively different from the parental input received by monolingual children, in that it contains a higher rate of deviant preverbal subjects. Second, parental input quality in addition to quantity may affect the outcome of heritage language acquisition, in that children producing a higher rate of preverbal subjects had parents whose Greek input was not only quantitatively reduced, but also richer in preverbal subjects.

Case marking and word order in Greek heritage children.

This study examined the linguistic and individual-level factors that render case marking a vulnerable domain in English-dominant Greek heritage children. We also investigated whether heritage language (HL) children can use case-marking cues to interpret (non-)canonical sentences in Greek similarly to their monolingual peers. A group of six- to twelve-year-old Greek heritage children in New York City and a control group of age-matched monolingual children living in Greece participated in a production and a picture verification task targeting case marking and (non-)canonical word order in Greek. HL children produced syncretic inflectional errors, also found in preschool monolingual children. In the comprehension task, HL children showed variable performance on the non-canonical OVS but ceiling performance on the SVO conditions, which suggests influence from English. Linguistic factors such as case transparency affected comprehension, whereas child-level factors such as proficiency and degree of (early) use of Greek influenced performance on both modalities.

Age of acquisition of 299 words in seven languages: American English, Czech, Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malay, Persian and Western Armenian.

We present a new set of subjective Age of Acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in seven languages from various language families and cultural settings: American English, Czech, Scottish Gaelic, Lebanese Arabic, Malaysian Malay, Persian, and Western Armenian. The ratings were collected from a total of 173 participants and were highly reliable in each language. We applied the same method of data collection as used in a previous study on 25 languages which allowed us to create a database of fully comparable AoA ratings of 299 words in 32 languages. We found that in the seven languages not included in the previous study, the words are estimated to be acquired at roughly the same age as in the previously reported languages, i.e. mostly between the ages of 1 and 7 years. We also found that the order of word acquisition is moderately to highly correlated across all 32 languages, which extends our previous conclusion that early words are acquired in similar order across a wide range of languages and cultures.

Tense and plural formation in Welsh-English bilingual children with and without language impairment.

BACKGROUND: Grammatical morphology has been shown to be problematic for children with specific language impairment (SLI) or developmental language disorder (DLD). Most research on this topic comes from widely spoken languages, such as English. Despite Welsh being the most extensively spoken indigenous in the UK after English, and Wales being the only official bilingual country in the UK, our knowledge about the morphosyntactic areas of Welsh that may pose problems for Welsh-speaking children with SLI is limited. Currently, Welsh-speaking speech and language therapists (SLTs) are heavily reliant on the use of informally translated English assessments. This can inadvertently result in a failure to take aspects of Welsh morphosyntax into account that are critical for the assessment and treatment of Welsh-speaking children. AIMS: This is the first study to examine how Welsh-English bilingual children of early school age with typical development (bi-TD) and with SLI (bi-SLI) perform on production tasks targeting verbal and nominal morphology in Welsh. We targeted areas of Welsh morphosyntax that could potentially be vulnerable for Welsh-speaking children with or at risk of language impairment, such as tense marking and plural formation, and assessed their diagnostic potential. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Twenty-eight Welsh-dominant bilingual children participated in the study: 10 bi-SLI and 18 bi-TD. They were administered three elicitation tasks targeting the production of verbal (compound and synthetic past tense) and nominal (plural) morphology in Welsh. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The bi-SLI children performed worse than their bi-TD peers across all three tasks. They produced more uninflected verbs in the elicited-production task and were less likely to be prompted to produce the synthetic past, which is a concatenating, low-frequency form of the past tense. They also over-regularized less in the context of plural nouns, and when they did, they opted for high-frequency suffixes. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: By focusing on aspects of morphosyntactic development which are unique to Welsh, we have increased existing about how verbal and nominal morphology are acquired in Welsh-speaking bi-SLI and bi-TD children. The present results point towards productivity problems for Welsh-speaking bi-SLI children who are adversely influenced by low-frequency structures and fail to over-regularize in the context of verbal and nominal concatenating morphology. From a clinical perspective, targeting synthetic past-tense forms through a prompting task may be a promising assessment and intervention tool that future studies could explore further.

The Pre-attentive L2 Orthographic Perception Mechanism Utilized by Bilinguals with Different Proficiency Levels.

Language proficiency is predicted to modulate orthographic-semantic association in second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition, in accordance with the assumptions of the Developmental Bilingual Interactive-Activation model (BIA-d) (Grainger et al., 2010). The current study explored this modulation during pre-attentive L2 orthographic perception. ERPs were recorded from Chinese-English bilinguals with different L2 proficiency during their pre-attentive response to deviant and standard stimuli arranged in the oddball paradigm. Two stimulus types were investigated separately: L2 orthography and L1 orthography. In the L2 orthography condition, a MMN-N400 complex (i.e., deviancy effect) was found in the high L2 proficiency bilinguals, but only a marginally significant reduced negativity in an early time window was found in the low L2 proficiency bilinguals. In the L1 orthography condition, the high and low L2 proficiency bilinguals showed similar deviancy effect in the form of MMN-P3a-LPC complex. The current findings suggest that proficiency modulates pre-attentive L2 orthographic perception, such that the high L2 proficiency bilinguals activate the associated semantic representation instantly upon orthographic decoding, while the orthographic-semantic connection is not activated for the low L2 proficiency bilinguals. This is probably due to their difference in the strength of orthographic-semantic association. These findings contribute to the understanding of orthographic processing by bilinguals at the pre-attentive level and provide supporting evidence for the BIA-d model.

Cognitive advantages of immersion education after 1year: Effects of amount of exposure.

Previous studies with bilingual children have shown that the nature of their second-language instruction has an effect on the development of their cognitive abilities. The aim of this study was to determine whether children who acquire a second language in two different immersion programs for a period of 1year show advantages in executive functions and to examine how the amount of daily exposure affects executive functions. A group of Serbian-speaking second-grade children exposed to the second language for about 5h each day (high exposure group, HEG) and a low-exposure group (LEG) exposed to the second language for about 1.5h each day were compared with an age-matched control group (CG) of monolingual peers on working memory, inhibition, and shifting. Significant group differences were found for working memory, with the HEG performing better than the CG and LEG even after controlling for individual differences in terms of age and intelligence. The three groups did not differ in terms of inhibition and overall shifting abilities, although the control group had a marginally significant advantage on one of the two shifting tasks. Our findings extend previous research by demonstrating that the amount of daily exposure is a significant factor affecting executive functions in early immersion programs for second-language acquisition. In addition, they show that early intensive second-language acquisition can be advantageous for performance on tasks that require a higher level of executive control.

"Which mouse kissed the frog?" Effects of age of onset, length of exposure, and knowledge of case marking on the comprehension of wh-questions in German-speaking simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children.

Studies examining age of onset (AoO) effects in childhood bilingualism have provided mixed results as to whether early sequential bilingual children (eL2) differ from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) and L2 children on the acquisition of morphosyntax. Differences between the three groups have been attributed to other factors such as length of exposure (LoE), language abilities, and the phenomenon to be acquired. The present study investigates whether four- to five-year-old German-speaking eL2 children differ from 2L1 children on the acquisition of wh-questions, and whether these differences can be explained by AoO, LoE, and/or knowledge of case marking. The 2L1 children outperformed the eL2 children in terms of accuracy; however, both bilingual groups exhibited similar error patterns. This suggests that 2L1 and eL2 bilingual children are sensitive to the same morphosyntactic cues, when comprehending wh-questions. Finally, children's performance on the different types of wh-questions was explained by a combination of knowledge of case marking, LoE, and AoO.

Annoying Danish relatives: comprehension and production of relative clauses by Danish children with and without SLI.

This study examines the comprehension and production of subject and object relative clauses (SRCs, ORCs) by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The purpose is to investigate whether relative clauses are problematic for Danish children with SLI and to compare errors with those produced by TD children. Eighteen children with SLI, eighteen TD age-matched (AM) and nine TD language-matched (LM) Danish-speaking children participated in a comprehension and in a production task. All children performed better on the comprehension compared with the production task, as well as on SRCs compared to ORCs and produced various avoidance strategies. In the ORC context, children with SLI produced more reversal errors than the AM children, who opted for passive ORCs. These results are discussed within current theories of SLI and indicate a deficiency with the assignment of thematic roles rather than with the structural make-up of RCs.

Production of tense marking in successive bilingual children: when do they converge with their monolingual peers?

Children with English as a second language (L2) with exposure of 18 months or less exhibit similar difficulties to children with Specific Language Impairment in tense marking, a marker of language impairment for English. This paper examines whether L2 children with longer exposure converge with their monolingual peers in the production of tense marking. Thirty-eight successive bilingual Turkish-English speaking (L2) children with a mean age of 7;8 and 33 monolingual English-speaking (L1) age-matched controls completed the screening test of the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI). The L2 children as a group were as accurate as the controls in the production of -ed, but performed significantly lower than the controls in the production of third person -s. Age and years of exposure (YoE) affected the children's performance. The highest age-expected performance on the TEGI was attested in 8- and 9-year-old children who had 4-6 YoE. L1 and L2 children performed better in regular compared to irregular verbs, but L2 children overregularized more than L1 children and were less sensitive to the phonological properties of verbs. The results show that tense marking and the screening test of the TEGI may be promising for differential diagnosis in 8- and 9-year-old L2 children with at least four YoE.