Identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in multilingual children: A case study tutorial.

PURPOSE: A long-standing issue in identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in multilingual children is differentiating between effects of language experience and genuine impairment when clinicians often lack suitable norm-referenced assessments. In this tutorial we demonstrate, via a case study, that it is feasible to identify DLD in a multilingual child using the CATALISE diagnostic criteria, Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) assessment tools, and telepractice. METHOD: This tutorial features a case study of one 6-year-old Urdu-Cantonese multilingual ethnic minority child, and seven age- and grade-matched multilinguals. They were tested via Zoom using Urdu versions of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN), the Crosslinguistic Lexical Task (LITMUS-CLT), the Crosslinguistic Nonword Repetition Test (LITMUS-CL-NWR), and the Sentence Repetition Task (LITMUS-SRep). RESULT: The child scored significantly lower in the LITMUS tests compared to her peers in her best/first language of Urdu. Together with the presence of negative functional impact and poor prognostic features, and absence of associated biomedical conditions, the findings suggest this participant could be identified as having DLD using the CATALISE diagnostic criteria. CONCLUSION: The result demonstrates the promise of this approach to collect reference data and identify DLD in multilingual children. The online LITMUS battery has the potential to support identification of multilingual DLD in any target language.

Impact of Narrative Task Complexity and Language on Macrostructure in Bilingual Kindergarten Children.

PURPOSE: We investigated the impact of narrative task complexity on macrostructure in both languages of bilingual kindergarten children and the relationship of macrostructure across languages to guide practitioners' choice of assessment tools and aid in interpretation of results. METHOD: Thirty-nine English-Hebrew bilingual kindergarten children (Mage = 65 months) retold two narratives in each language: a one-episode story and a three-episode story. Stories were coded for macrostructure using five story grammar (SG) elements: Internal State-Initiating Event, Goal, Attempt, Outcome, and Internal State-Reaction. Linear mixed and generalized linear mixed models were used to analyze scores for total macrostructure, episode, and SG elements; correlations were conducted to examine cross-language relations in macrostructure. RESULTS: In general, performance on the single-episode story was significantly better than for the three-episode story: higher percentages of SG elements were produced, with better performance in the home language/English. In addition to Task and Language effects, Age and Episode (Episodes 1/2/3 of the three-episode story vs. one-episode story) emerged as predictors of macrostructure. Performance on the different episodes of the three-episode story varied, with Episode 3 yielding scores similar to those on the one-episode story. Children produced more Attempts and Outcomes than other SG elements. Finally, the total macrostructure scores yielded low to moderate correlations across languages for both one-episode and three-episode stories, but there were no significant cross-task (one-episode/three-episode story) correlations. CONCLUSIONS: The study illustrates the importance of task complexity in narrative performance. Ideally, assessment should include a variety of tools, which would include narratives varying in complexity. However, time constraints do not always permit this luxury. The findings here may offer more to therapists than to diagnosticians. Narratives should be manipulated for episodic complexity not only in the number of episodes but also with regard to characters, goals, feelings, and reactions to events. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25222094.

Parental reports on the lexicon of children from diverse bilingual populations.

Parental questionnaires have been widely used to assess children's vocabularies. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories (MB-CDI) have been adapted into over 100 languages, providing researchers with access to various languages. As the vocabularies of bilingual children are distributed across their two languages, language knowledge must be assessed in both languages. While this can be done with two questionnaires, one for each language, the present study makes use of a multicultural adaptation of the MB-CDI, within a single questionnaire, that was geared specifically for bilingual context. In order to explore the developmental trajectories of the vocabularies of 90 bilingual children from diverse linguistic populations (English-Hebrew (n = 30), French-Hebrew (n = 30), and Russian-Hebrew (n = 30) speaking families) parents reported on both the Home Language (HL) and the Societal Language-Hebrew (SL-Hebrew). Parents also provided background information about the child, the child's family, and exposure to each language. Our findings show no significant difference between vocabulary size of children from diverse bilingual populations in the HL and the SL, for both production and comprehension. Moreover, children from all three groups demonstrate balanced bilingualism at the group level. Correlations were found between both exposure to and use of each language by children, and various vocabulary measures across the three groups. The similar vocabulary levels demonstrated by the three groups as well as the balanced bilingualism can be explained by the relatively high prestige of all languages tested. Exposure to each language shows support in that language and a negative effect on the other language, demonstrating the crucial role exposure plays in bilingual children's language performance.

Hebrew-L2 speakers process auditory templatic words through their L1 processing mechanism with awareness of L2.

Bilingualism involves cross-linguistic influence (CLI) prompted by communicative function, which impacts the activation of the bilingual's L1/L2 language processing mechanisms. The current study examines the extent of CLI when semantic information is reduced. Semitic languages are known for their templatic words composed of intertwined sub-lexical root and template morphemes, entailing non-linear morphological processing. As the roots constitute the semantic core, comprehension was found to impact morphological processing among Hebrew-L2 readers. Herein, we assessed the processing mechanism activated among adult Hebrew-L2 bilinguals in an auditory rhyme judgment task that requires linear processing. The task was provided with Hebrew templatic word pairs comprising accentuated (meta)linguistic information irrespective of semantics: phonological co-occurrence restrictions (root), grammatical information of vocalic melodies (template), and contrastive stress. We hypothesized that CLI in Hebrew-L2 speakers would be reflected in low accuracy rates in rhyming pairs when linguistic information is accentuated, indicating distraction from the linear processing due to activation levels of the L2 processing mechanism caused by competing linguistic cues drawn on transferred linguistic information. We compared the performance of 58 adult Hebrew native speakers with 54 Hebrew-L2 speakers with Semitic and non-Semitic-L1. The findings demonstrate that Hebrew-L2 speakers performed the task using their L1 processing mechanism with varying activation levels of L2, showing awareness of the morphological processing due to the vocalic melody for non-Semitic-L1 and awareness of contrastive stress for Semitic-L1. The results confirm CLI also when semantics is reduced, elucidating how much CLI modulates the bilingual's language processing mechanism.

Emergence of verb-pattern morphology in young Arabic speakers: morphological and semantic features.

Introduction: Arabic, a Semitic language, displays a particularly rich derivational morphological system with all verb stems consisting of a semantic root and a prosodic verb-pattern. Such regular and frequently encountered knowledge is expected to be acquired early. The present study presents a developmental perspective on the relative contribution of morphological and semantic complexity to the acquisition of verbs in Spoken Arabic. Method: Verbs in a spontaneous corpus from 133 typically developing children, 2; 6-6; 0-year-old, were coded for type and token frequency of verbal patterns and root type, and classified according to semantic complexity. Results: Results support an item-based emergence driven by semantic complexity at the earliest stages of acquisition. A developmental expansion in the diversity of verbal patterns and morphological complexity was observed with age. Morphological complexity is only identified when the same root appears in different verb patterns. Discussion: The late emergence of the same root in different verb patterns indicates that the perception of verb patterns as abstract linguistic entities beyond the actual verbs is attained later than the semantically-constrained verbs in earlier childhood. We conclude that whereas semantic complexity obstructs verbs from emerging in the lexicon in younger age groups, morphological complexity constitutes no such obstruction, since their perception as morphological devices is attained later in acquisition.

Profiling Bilingual Children: Using Monolingual Assessment to Inform Diagnosis.

PURPOSE: Diagnostic tools developed for monolinguals are frequently used for bilingual linguistic assessment. The absence of evaluation criteria for using monolingual norms for bilinguals contributes to inconsistent diagnostic procedures, impacting research and clinical practice. This study considers the reliance on monolingual tools to assess the heritage language to identify bilingual atypical language development (ALD) even when bilingual norms are available for the societal language. METHOD: One hundred thirty-one English-Hebrew bilingual children aged 5;6-5;11 (years;months) were assessed using diagnostic tools. Bilingual standards are available for the societal language but not for the heritage language. Fifteen English-Hebrew bilingual children were suspected of ALD. They were individually compared with 116 typically developing bilingual peers. The Core Language Score and seven subtest standardized scores of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool-Second Edition were analyzed in the heritage language, English. RESULTS: Results revealed that a composite score used for differential diagnosis in monolingual children cannot be relied upon for bilingual children. Measurements vary in their diagnostic accuracy, with Concepts and Following Directions (comprehension of instructions), Receptive and Expressive Word Classes (lexicon), and Sentence Repetition (syntax) being the most promising for identifying ALD in bilingual children. Lastly, bilingual children's age of onset of bilingualism must be considered in the analysis of linguistic outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Findings elucidate that monolingual assessments for heritage speakers must consider bilingual models of development to ensure a reliable and informative diagnosis. Interacting factors, such as reliance on language-specific knowledge and the recruitment of other nonlinguistic processing skills, may influence a measurement's sensitivity. The findings are pertinent to the practice of speech-language pathologists, informing evidence-based assessment procedures for bilingual children. A group study to determine whether the suggested bilingual standards can identify ALD with acceptable specificity and sensitivity is now recommended.

Using a monolingual screening test for assessing bilingual children.

Bilingual language development is different from monolingual language development. The lack of appropriate assessment tools geared to the bilingual population has led to inaccurate over-diagnosis of bilingual children with typical language development (TLD) as children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and under-diagnosis of bilingual children with DLD. The present paper addresses this challenge by focusing on Hebrew as a second language (L2) of bilingual preschool children whose first language (L1) is either English or Russian, taking into consideration both chronological age (CA) and age of onset of bilingualism (AOB). This study aimed to generate bilingual standards for a monolingual screening test, Goralnik Screening Test for Hebrewby arriving at appropriate bilingual typical development cut-off points. A total of 443 bilingual Hebrew speaking children (397 with TLD and 46 with DLD), ages 61-78 months (M = 70; SD = 4), 199 with L1 English and 244 with L1 Russian, took part in the study. The results demonstrate low diagnostic accuracy when a monolingual test with monolingual norms is used for bilingual children, in contrast with increased diagnostic accuracy when bilingual standards are used for bilingual children. The paper concludes by showing the importance of bilingual standards when assessing clinical populations with varying ages of acquisition, and in particular, for those who were exposed to their second language after the age of four.

Crosslinguistic Influence (CLI) of Lexical Breadth and Depth in the Vocabulary of Bilingual Kindergarten Children - A Bilingual Intervention Study.

Introduction: Research in recent years has explored the vocabulary size (lexical breadth) of bilingual children, but less is known about the richness of bilingual word knowledge (lexical depth), and about how knowledge of words in the two languages interact. This study explores how bilingual narrative intervention with vocabulary instruction in each language may modulate crosslinguistic influence (CLI) between the languages of bilingual kindergarten children, focusing on CLI of lexical knowledge, and which factors modulate performance. Methods: Forty-one typically developing English-Hebrew bilingual children (M = 64.63 months) participated. A bilingual adaptation of Story Champs narrative intervention program (Spencer and Petersen, 2012) was used to deliver vocabulary instruction in separate blocks of home language (HL) and school language (SL) sessions. Different intervention words were targeted in each language, but the children were tested on all target words in both languages. Lexical knowledge was assessed with a definition task four times throughout the study: prior to intervention, after each intervention block, and 4-6 weeks later. Learner characteristics (chronological age, age of onset of bilingualism and length of exposure) and proficiency in each language (standardized tests, familiarity with the vocabulary introduced in the intervention at baseline) were examined as possible modulators of performance. Results: Children showed growth in lexical breadth and depth in their HL/English after HL intervention and in lexical breadth in the SL/Hebrew following SL intervention, with CLI for semantic depth observed via a qualitative analysis, but not quantitatively. Better HL/English performance was correlated with later AoB (and shorter SL exposure) and higher HL language proficiency scores. Children with higher HL/English proficiency responded better to the SL/Hebrew intervention, gaining more than those with lower English proficiency. Children with SL/Hebrew vocabulary dominance at the outset of the study also gained more from the HL/English intervention. No correlations were found between learner characteristics and SL performance. Discussion: The current study indicates that bilingual narrative intervention with vocabulary instruction may be efficacious for improving the lexical breadth and depth of bilingual kindergarten children. It suggests that CLI may enhance bilingual children's language learning success, and points to the importance of strengthening both languages of bilingual children.

Vocabulary Gains in Bilingual Narrative Intervention.

Purpose The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effect of bilingual narrative intervention on vocabulary gains in Hebrew (school language) and English (home language) among English-Hebrew bilinguals, using a block design (one language at a time), and to determine whether there was cross-linguistic transfer to the language that was not receiving intervention. Method Sixteen English-Hebrew bilingual children participated in the study using an adaptation of the Puente de Cuentos intervention. Vocabulary was examined using a word definition task before the intervention, post English intervention, post Hebrew intervention, and 4 weeks after the interventions ended to examine maintenance of skills. Results Repeated-measures analyses of variance revealed that children made significant gains in vocabulary in the language of intervention as expected. In addition, children made cross-linguistic gains in Hebrew during the English intervention, but made no gains in English following Hebrew intervention. Conclusion These results underscore the need to provide language support in the home language to ensure growth and that intervention in the home language does not hinder growth in the school language.

Vocabulary, Metalinguistic Awareness and Language Dominance Among Bilingual Preschool Children.

Awareness of language structure has been studied in bilinguals, but there is limited research on how language dominance is related to metalinguistic awareness, and whether metalinguistic awareness predicts vocabulary size. The present study aims to explore the role of language dominance in the relation between vocabulary size in both languages of bilingual children and metalinguistic awareness in the societal language. It evaluates the impact of two metalinguistic awareness abilities, morphological and lexical awareness, on receptive and expressive vocabulary size. This is of special interest since most studies focus on the impact of exposure on vocabulary size but very few explore the impact of the interaction between metalinguistic awareness and dominance. 5-6-year-old preschool children with typical language development participated in the study: 15 Russian-Hebrew bilingual children dominant in the societal language (SL) Hebrew, 21 Russian-Hebrew bilingual children dominant in the Heritage language (HL) Russian and 32 monolingual children. Dominance was determined by relative proficiency, based on standardized tests in the two languages. Tasks of morphological and lexical awareness were administered in SL-Hebrew, along with measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary size in both languages. Vocabulary size in SL-Hebrew was significantly higher for SL-dominant bilinguals (who performed like monolinguals) than for HL-dominant bilinguals, while HL-Russian vocabulary size was higher for HL-dominant bilinguals than for SL-dominant bilinguals. A hierarchical regression analyzing the relationship between vocabulary size and metalinguistic awareness showed that dominance, lexical metalinguistic awareness and the interaction between the two were predictors of both receptive and expressive vocabulary size. Morphological metalinguistic awareness was not a predictor of vocabulary size. The relationship between lexical awareness and SL-vocabulary size was limited to the HL-dominant group. HL-dominant bilinguals relied on lexical metalinguistic awareness, measured by fast mapping abilities, that is, the abilities to acquire new words, in expanding their vocabulary size, whereas SL-dominant bilinguals and monolinguals did not. This difference reflects the milestones of lexical acquisition the different groups have reached. These findings show that metalinguistic awareness should also be taken into consideration when evaluating the variables that influence vocabulary size among bilinguals though different ways in different dominance groups.

Independent and Combined Effects of Socioeconomic Status (SES) and Bilingualism on Children's Vocabulary and Verbal Short-Term Memory.

The current study explores the influence of socioeconomic status (SES) and bilingualism on the linguistic skills and verbal short-term memory of preschool children. In previous studies comparing children of low and mid-high SES, the terms "a child with low-SES" and "a child speaking a minority language" are often interchangeable, not enabling differentiated evaluation of these two variables. The present study controls for this confluence by testing children born and residing in the same country and attending the same kindergartens, with all bilingual children speaking the same heritage language (HL-Russian). A total of 120 children (88 bilingual children: 44 with low SES; and 32 monolingual children: 16 with low SES) with typical language development, aged 5; 7-6; 7, were tested in the societal language (SL-Hebrew) on expressive vocabulary and three repetition tasks [forward digit span (FWD), nonword repetition (NWR), and sentence repetition (SRep)], which tap into verbal short-term memory. The results indicated that SES and bilingualism impact different child abilities. Bilingualism is associated with decreased vocabulary size and lower performance on verbal short-term memory tasks with higher linguistic load in the SL-Hebrew. The negative effect of bilingualism on verbal short-term memory disappears once vocabulary is accounted for. SES influences not only linguistic performance, but also verbal short-term memory with lowest linguistic load. The negative effect of SES cannot be solely attributed to lower vocabulary scores, suggesting that an unprivileged background has a negative impact on children's cognitive development beyond a linguistic disadvantage. The results have important clinical implications and call for more research exploring the varied impact of language and life experience on children's linguistic and cognitive skills.

Story grammar elements and causal relations in the narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual children with SLI and typical language development.

BACKGROUND: While there is general agreement regarding poor performance of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) on microstructure measures of narrative production, findings on macrostructure are inconsistent. PURPOSE: The present study analyzed narrative abilities of Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschool children with and without SLI, with a particular focus on story grammar (SG) elements and causal relations, in order to identify macrostructure features which distinguish bilingual children with SLI from those with typical development. METHOD: Narratives were collected from 35 typically developing bilinguals (BiTD) and 14 bilinguals with SLI (BiSLI) in both Russian/L1 and Hebrew/L2 using a retelling procedure (LITMUS-Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives) (Gagarina, Klop, Kunnari, Tantele, Välimaa, Balciuniene, Bohnacker, & Walters, 2012). Each story contained three episodes, and each episode introduced a different protagonist with explicitly stated Goals (G), Attempts (A) and Outcomes (O). Causal relations assessed included Enabling, Physical, Motivational, and Psychological relations, following Trabasso & Nickels (1992). Each Goal-Attempt-Outcome (GAO) episode was examined for the use of SG elements and causal relations. RESULTS: Group differences emerged for both aspects of macrostructure. For causal relations, narratives of BiSLI children contained fewer Enabling and Physical relations, and differed qualitatively from those of BiTD children. For SG elements, BiSLI children referred to fewer SG elements than BiTD children in the first episode, but performed like BiTD children in the second and the third episodes. CONCLUSIONS: Story grammar elements in specific episodes along with Enabling and Physical causal relations distinguish the narratives of children with BiSLI from those with BiTD, which stresses the importance of examining wider array of macrostructure features in narratives.

Quantitative and qualitative differences in the lexical knowledge of monolingual and bilingual children on the LITMUS-CLT task.

While bilingual children follow the same milestones of language acquisition as monolingual children do in learning the syntactic patterns of their second language (L2), their vocabulary size in L2 often lags behind compared to monolinguals. The present study explores the comprehension and production of nouns and verbs in Hebrew, by two groups of 5- to 6-year olds with typical language development: monolingual Hebrew speakers (N = 26), and Russian-Hebrew bilinguals (N = 27). Analyses not only show quantitative gaps between comprehension and production and between nouns and verbs, with a bilingual effect in both, but also a qualitative difference between monolinguals and bilinguals in their production errors: monolinguals' errors reveal knowledge of the language rules despite temporary access difficulties, while bilinguals' errors reflect gaps in their knowledge of Hebrew (L2). The nature of Hebrew as a Semitic language allows one to explore this qualitative difference in the semantic and morphological level.

Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT).

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.

Diagnostic accuracy of repetition tasks for the identification of specific language impairment (SLI) in bilingual children: evidence from Russian and Hebrew.

BACKGROUND: Previous research demonstrates that repetition tasks are valuable tools for diagnosing specific language impairment (SLI) in monolingual children in English and a variety of other languages, with non-word repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SRep) yielding high levels of sensitivity and specificity. Yet, only a few studies have addressed the diagnostic accuracy of repetition tasks in bilingual children, and most available research focuses on English-Spanish sequential bilinguals. AIMS: To evaluate the efficacy of three repetition tasks (forward digit span (FWD), NWR and SRep) in order to distinguish mono- and bilingual children with and without SLI in Russian and Hebrew. METHODS & PROCEDURES: A total of 230 mono- and bilingual children aged 5;5-6;8 participated in the study: 144 bilingual Russian-Hebrew-speaking children (27 with SLI); and 52 monolingual Hebrew-speaking children (14 with SLI) and 34 monolingual Russian-speaking children (14 with SLI). Parallel repetition tasks were designed in both Russian and Hebrew. Bilingual children were tested in both languages. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The findings confirmed that NWR and SRep are valuable tools in distinguishing monolingual children with and without SLI in Russian and Hebrew, while the results for FWD were mixed. Yet, testing of bilingual children with the same tools using monolingual cut-off points resulted in inadequate diagnostic accuracy. We demonstrate, however, that the use of bilingual cut-off points yielded acceptable levels of diagnostic accuracy. The combination of SRep tasks in L1/Russian and L2/Hebrew yielded the highest overall accuracy (i.e., 94%), but even SRep alone in L2/Hebrew showed excellent levels of sensitivity (i.e., 100%) and specificity (i.e., 89%), reaching 91% of total diagnostic accuracy. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The results are very promising for identifying SLI in bilingual children and for showing that testing in the majority language with bilingual cut-off points can provide an accurate classification.

Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages: Is there a cross-linguistic order of words?

We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present a comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs. This comparison shows a consistency in the orders of ratings across the 25 languages. The data were then analyzed (1) to ascertain how the demographic characteristics of the participants influenced AoA estimations and (2) to assess differences caused by the exact form of the target question (when did you learn vs. when do children learn this word); (3) to compare the ratings obtained in our study to those of previous studies; and (4) to assess the validity of our study by comparison with quasi-objective AoA norms derived from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). All 299 words were judged as being acquired early (mostly before the age of 6 years). AoA ratings were associated with the raters' social or language status, but not with the raters' age or education. Parents reported words as being learned earlier, and bilinguals reported learning them later. Estimations of the age at which children learn the words revealed significantly lower ratings of AoA. Finally, comparisons with previous AoA and MB-CDI norms support the validity of the present estimations. Our AoA ratings are available for research or other purposes.

Between L2 and SLI: inflections and prepositions in the Hebrew of bilingual children with TLD and monolingual children with SLI.

Verb inflectional morphology and prepositions are loci of difficulty for bilingual children with typical language development (TLD) as well as children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). This paper examines errors in these linguistic domains in these two populations. Bilingual English-Hebrew and Russian-Hebrew preschool children, aged five to seven, with TLD, and age-matched monolingual Hebrew-speaking children with SLI, were tested using sentence completion and sentence imitation tasks in their L2 Hebrew. Our findings show that, despite the similarity in the locus of errors, the two populations can be distinguished by both the quantity and the quality of errors. While bilingual children with TLD had substitution errors often motivated by the first language, most of the errors of monolingual children with SLI involved omission of the whole morpheme or feature reduction. This difference in the nature of the errors is discussed in terms of bilingual processing vs. impaired representation.

The emergence of grammar: early verbs and beyond.

The paper examines the first twenty verb-forms recorded for six Hebrew-speaking children aged between 1;2 and 2;1, and how they evolve into fully inflected verbs for three of these children. Discussion focuses first on what word-forms children initially select for the verbs they produce, what role these forms play in children's emergent grammar, and how emergent grammar is reflected in the acquisition of fully inflected forms of verbs. Children's early verb repertoire indicates that they possess a strong basis for moving into the expression of a variety of semantic roles and the syntax of a range of different verb-argument structures. On the other hand, children's initial use of verbs demonstrates that they still need to acquire considerable language-particular grammatical knowledge in order to encode such relations explicitly. This language-particular knowledge demonstrates a clear pattern of acquisition, in which aspect precedes inflectional marking for gender, followed by tense, and then by person.