Verb inflection as a diagnostic marker for SLI in bilingual children. The use of verb inflection (3rd sg present tense) by unimpaired bilingual children and bilingual children with SLI

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2017-06-29
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en
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The aim of this study was to investigate whether successive bilingual children with specific language impairment (age 5;0-8; 11) differ from unimpaired bilingual children (age 5;0-8;8) in their use of the 3rd sg present tense (3 rd sg). It is the expectation that successive bilingual children with specific language impairment (N=27) omit the 3rd sg more frequently than the unimpaired successive bilingual children (N=25). In order to investigate this expectation, the outcomes of two production tasks were analyzed: the completion task and the narrative task. The performance of the children on the completion task confirmed that successive bilingual children with SLI omit the 3rd sg agreement marker (-t) significantly more often than unimpaired successive bilingual children. However, no effect of SLI was found in the narrative task. Furthermore, no age effects were found in the two tasks. There was a positive and significant correlation between the narrative and the completion tasks. In addition, the results pointed out that the participants performed better in the narrative task than in the completion task. Although an effect of SLI was found for the production of the 3rd sg in the completion task in, the results of this present study were not strong enough to meet the requirements of a diagnostic marker of SLI.
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