E4: Specific language impairment and early second language acquisition: Differentiating Deviations in morphosyntactic acquisition

Project leader: Prof. Dr. Monika Rothweiler, FB 12, University of Bremen (www.monikarothweiler.de)

Collaborators: Dr. Manuela Schönenberger, Franziska Sterner

This project investigates the acquisition of syntax and morphology in early L2 German by children with L1 Turkish. These children either do or do not have SLI.

The following three questions are central to the project:

What does the acquisition of L2 German look like in young children whose first exposure to German is at age 3?
What are the typical features of SLI in the L2 German of children with SLI who start to acquire German at age 3?
What are the clinical markers of SLI in Turkish?

To address these questions we examine the longitudinal data of more than 20 successive bilingual children who have been exposed to Turkish only for the first three years of their life and whose first contact with German is at age 3 when they start to attend kindergarten. We collected data from children without SLI, as well as from children who appear to have SLI, over a period of 24-30 months. We also collected data over a period of 12 months from older successive bilingual children (6-8 years of age) with the same age of onset and who have been diagnosed with SLI. Since SLI manifests itself in every language a speaker acquires, data on L1 Turkish have also been collected from time to time to gain some insight into these children's linguistic development in Turkish. The combination of languages (Turkish/German) and the type of acquisition (L1/early L2) as well as the absence vs. manifestation of SLI in the group of children we are studying enables us to attempt to answer the three questions central to the project.

The first question concerns the early successive acquisition by children without SLI and touches upon the issue of a critical period in language acquisition. The results obtained so far support the hypothesis that the linguistic development of children who start to acquire a second language before age 4 parallels that of monolingual children. The acquisition of clause structure and subject-verb agreement in German by these successive bilingual children closely resembles that of monolingual children (Rothweiler 2006). A comparison of these data with data from the Wegener corpus of Turkish-speaking children whose first contact with German is at age 6 shows that transfer from L1 Turkish does not seem to play a role in the children with a much earlier age of onset, i.e. age 3 (Chilla 2008, Kroffke & Rothweiler 2006). We are currently investigating other domains of grammar which involve lexical learning, as, for example, gender. If it turns out that there are differences in this domain between successive bilingual children and monolingual children a closer examination of vocabulary size and transfer from L1 will be required to determine whether these factors influence the acquisition of gender.

The second question is concerned with the acquisition of grammar in L2 German by children with SLI, that is, children whose language development in Turkish also differs from that of typically-developing Turkish-acquiring children. Findings on the acquisition of the German sentence structure by the successive bilingual children with SLI mirror those of monolingual German children with SLI (Chilla 2008). These results are not really surprising, since the successive bilingual children without SLI pattern with typically-developing monolingual German children in this respect as well. These findings are important for the identification of SLI in diagnostic screening. However, a detailed investigation into other grammatical domains is necessary to confirm the inference that the development in successive bilingual children with or without SLI is parallel to that of monolingual children with or without SLI.

The third question relates to the manifestation of SLI in Turkish. Since there are no studies of SLI in Turkish our project tries to identify clinical markers of SLI in Turkish. An examination of the Turkish data collected in this project suggests deviations in case morphology and verb morphology (Babur, Rothweiler & Kroffke 2007; Chilla & Babur in press).

Methodological approach:

We evaluate spontaneous production data as well as elicited data collected over a period of 24-30 months. The children participating in this project all speak Turkish as their L1 and have been first exposed to German at age 3 on entry to a German kindergarten. They have been classified into the following four groups:

Group 1: children without SLI, start of data collection between 1 to 3 months of exposure (ME)
Group 2: children without SLI, start of data collection after 12 ME
Group 3: children with SLI, start of data collection after 12 ME
Group 4: children with SLI attending primary school

To uncover similarities and differences between our data and other data, we compare the data from the successive bilingual children without SLI with the data of typically-developing children with L1 Turkish whose first exposure to German is at age 6 (Wegener corpus). The data from the successive bilingual children with SLI are compared with the data of monolingual German children with SLI (Clahsen corpus).

Publications

Babur, Ezel, Solveig Chilla & Bernd Meyer. 2008. Aspekte der Kommunikation in der logopädischen Diagnostik mit ein- und mehrsprachigen Kindern. In: Arbeiten zur Mehrsprachigkeit (AzM), Folge B, 85, Universität Hamburg.

Babur, Ezel, Monika Rothweiler & Solveig Kroffke. 2007. Spezifische Sprachentwicklungsstörung in der Erstsprache Türkisch. In: Linguistische Berichte 212. 377-402.

Chilla, Solveig. 2008a. Erstsprache, Zweitsprache, Spezifische Sprachentwicklungsstörung? Eine Untersuchung des Erwerbs der deutschen Hauptsatzstruktur durch sukzessiv-bilinguale Kinder mit türkischer Erstsprache. Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac.

Chilla, Solveig. 2008b. Störungen im Erwerb des Deutschen als Zweitsprache im Kindesalter – Eine Herausforderung an die sprachpädagogische Diagnostik. In: Diskurs Kindheits- und Jugendforschung 3. 277–290.

Chilla, Solveig & Ezel Babur (2010). Specific Language Impairment in Turkish-German successive bilingual children. Aspects of assessment and outcome. In: Topbaş, Seyhun & Mehmet Yavaş (eds.): Communication disorders in Turkish in monolingual and multilingual settings. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. 352-368.

Chilla, Solveig, Monika Rothweiler & Ezel Babur. 2010. Kindliche Mehrsprachigkeit. Grundlagen, Störungen, Diagnostik. München: Reinhardt.

Kroffke, Solveig. 2007. Mehrsprachige Kinder mit Spezifischer Sprachentwicklungsstörung Implikationen für die Diagnostik. In: L.O.G.O.S. interdisziplinär 15 (4). 253 – 262.

Kroffke, Solveig & Bernd Meyer. 2007. Verständigungsprobleme in bilingualen Anamnesegesprächen. In: Meyer, Bernd & Shinichi Kameyama (eds.): Mehrsprachigkeit am Arbeitsplatz. Frankfurt a. M. [u.a.]: Peter Lang, 149-184.

Kroffke, Solveig & Monika Rothweiler. 2006. Variation im frühen Zweitspracherwerb des Deutschen durch Kinder mit türkischer Erstsprache. In: Vliegen, Maurice (ed.). Variation in Sprachtheorie und Spracherwerb. Akten des 39. Linguistischen Kolloquiums, Amsterdam. - Frankfurt a.M. [u.a.]: Peter Lang. 145-153.

Papadopoulou, Despina, Monika Rothweiler, Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli, Solveig Chilla, Annnette Fox-Boyer, Kalliopi Katsika, Maria Mastropavlou, Agapi Mylonaki & Nadine Stahl. 2009. Motion verbs in Greek and German: Evidence from typically developing and SLI children. In: Tsangalidis, Anastasios (ed.). Selected Papers on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. 18th International Symposium. Monochromia: Thessaloniki. 289-309.

Rothweiler, Monika. 2010. The potential of studying SLI in bilinguals for linguistic research on SLI in monolinguals. Comment on Johanne Paradis "The Interface between Bilingual Development and Specific Language Impairment". In: Applied Psycholinguistics 31.102-106.

Rothweiler, Monika. 2009a. Critical periods and SLI. Comment on Jürgen Meisel “Second Language Acquisition in Early Childhood”. In: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 28,1. 49-57.

Rothweiler, Monika. 2009b. Über den Zusammenhang von Lexikon, Grammatik und Mehrsprachigkeit: Was kann die Spracherwerbsforschung für die Praxis liefern?. In: Sprachheilarbeit 54. 246-254.

Rothweiler, Monika. 2009c. Frühe Mehrsprachigkeit in der Kindertagesstätte. Vergleichen wir Äpfel mit Birnen? In: Ostfriesische Landschaft (Hg.) Mehrsprachiges Ostfriesland. Was der Erhalt der plattdeutschen Sprache bringt. Dokumentation. Ostfriesische Landschaft: Aurich. 18-40.

Rothweiler, Monika. 2007a. Spezifische Sprachentwicklungsstörung und Mehrsprachigkeit. In: Schöler, Hermann & Alfons Welling (eds.). Sonderpädagogik der Sprache. (= Borchert, Johannes & Herbert Goetze (eds.) Handbuch Sonderpädagogik, Band 1) Göttingen: Hogrefe. 254-258.

Rothweiler, Monika. 2007b. Multilingualism and language impairments. In: Auer, Peter & Li Wei (eds.). Multilingualism. (= Handbook of Applied Linguistics (HAL), edited by Antos, Gerd & Karlfried Knapp). Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. 229-246.

Rothweiler, Monika 2007c. Bilingualer Spracherwerb und Zweitspracherwerb. In: Steinbach, Markus et al. (eds.). Schnittstellen der germanistischen Linguistik. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler. 103-135.

Rothweiler, Monika. 2007d. ’Mistaken identity’ – Zum Problem der Unterscheidung typischer grammatischer Strukturen bei SSES und bei Mehrsprachigkeit". In: de Langen-Müller, Ulrike & Volker Maihack (eds.). Früh genug – aber wie? Sprachförderung per Erlass oder Sprachtherapie auf Rezept? Tagungsbericht vom 8. wissenschaftlichen Symposium des Deutschen Bundesverbandes der akademischen Sprachtherapeuten. Köln: ProLog. 110-128.

Rothweiler, Monika. 2006a. The acquisition of V2 and subordinate clauses in early successive acquisition of German. In: Lleó, Conxita (ed.). Interfaces in Multilingualism: Acquisition, Representation and Processing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 91-113.

Rothweiler, Monika. 2006b. Spezifische Sprachentwicklungsstörung und kindlicher Zweitspracherwerb. In: Rainer Bahr & Claudia Iven (eds.) Sprache, Emotion, Bewusstheit. Beiträge zur Sprachtherapie in Schule, Praxis, Klinik. Idstein: Schulz-Kirchner Verlag, 154-162.

Rothweiler, Monika. 2004. Spezifische Sprachentwicklungsstörung und früher Zweitspracherwerb. In: VHN - Vierteljahresschrift für Heilpädagogik und ihre Nachbargebiete 73, 167-178.

Rothweiler, Monika, Ezel Babur & Solveig Kroffke. 2007. Spezifische Sprachentwicklungsstörung im Kontext kindlicher Mehrsprachigkeit. Ergebnisse zur Kasusmorphologie in der Erstsprache Türkisch. In: Sprache, Stimme, Gehör 31. 1-7.

Rothweiler, Monika, Solveig Chilla & Ezel Babur. 2010. Specific Language Impairment in Turkish: Evidence from the acquisition of case markings in Turkish-German successive bilinguals. In: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 24 (7). 540-555.

Rothweiler, Monika, Solveig Kroffke & Michael Bernreuter. 2004a. Grammatikerwerb bei mehrsprachigen Kindern mit einer Spezifischen Sprachentwicklungsstörung. Voraussetzungen und Fragen. In: Arbeiten zur Mehrsprachigkeit (AzM), Folge B, 52, Universität Hamburg. 4-18.

Rothweiler, Monika, Solveig Kroffke & Michael Bernreuter. 2004b. Grammatikerwerb bei mehrsprachigen Kindern mit einer Spezifischen Sprachentwicklungsstörung. Voraussetzungen und Fragen. In: Die Sprachheilarbeit 49. 25-31.