Indicators of SLI in bilingual children: inflections and prepositions

1. Indicators of SLI in bilingual children: inflections and prepositions Sharon Armon-Lotem & Joel Walters The Bilingual SLI Project Bar-Ilan University, Israel SLRF 2008, October 17-19, Hawaii

2. Acknowledgements This work has been done in collaboration with: Gabi Danon, Jonathan Fine, Elinor Saiegh-Haddad, Bar-Ilan University Galit Adam, The Open University With the help of: Anat Blass, Michal Giladi, Efrat Harel, Audrey Levant, Ruti Litt, Lyle Lustinger, Sharon Porat, Efrat Shimon This research was supported by: THE ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (grant 938/03)

3. Aim The present study compares the use of verb inflections and prepositions in bilingual English-Hebrew children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), monolingual Hebrew speaking children with SLI and typically developing English-Hebrew bilingual children in order to identify clinical markers for SLI in bilingual children.

4. Inflections • English: All English-Hebrew bilinguals are expected to use Root Infinitives (RI), e.g., David play ball. • Hebrew: All English-Hebrew bilinguals might find 1st and 2nd person morphology challenging due to the absence of such features in their L1. Children with SLI are more likely to display omission, while TD bilinguals are more likely to substitute.

5. Prepositions • Better performance with Free prepositions (introducing temporal or locative PPs, e.g., at school), since they contributeto the meaning of the sentence. • Weaker performance for Obligatory prepositions (e.g., laugh at) since they are selected by the verb and mostly serve a grammatical function, as the theta-role of the verb is assigned to the following NP. • All bilingual children are expected to show code interference (CI) in contrasting environments. • SLI children may show omissions (Roeper 2000).

6. Subjects • 16 children, ages 5-7, with Specific Language Impairment (SLI): • 8 bilingual children (7 girls, 1 boy) – all scored lower than -1 SD below norm on the CELF preschool for English and lower than -1.5 SD below norm on the Goralnik for Hebrew. • 8 monolingual children (3 girls, 5 boys) from the same preschools - all scored lower than -1.5 SD below the norm on the Goralnik for Hebrew. All impaired children matched the exclusionary criteria for SLI. • 11 typically developing (TD) bilingual children (8 girls, 3 boys), ages 5-7s - all scored within the norm in both languages

7. Elicited Imitation Task • Inflections: 26 sentences in English (8 past tense, 8 3rd person, 10 bare/uninflected) and 40 in Hebrew (8 for each of 5 past tense inflections). • Prepositions: 24 simple sentences in each language, 10 with FREE prepositions, 14 with OBLIGATORY prepositions. • Sentence length • English: 5-8 words/morphemes (mean 6.5) • Hebrew: 4-7 words (mean 5.6), 5-10 morphemes (mean 7.5), and word/morpheme average is 6.5

8. Quantitative Analysis: Percentage of Success

9. * * * * Full repetition of target sentence • Significantly more full target responses among TD than SLI • No significant difference between bilingual SLI and monolingual SLI. • The significant difference between English and Hebrew is due to a significant difference in sentences targeting inflections, with Hebrew being weaker.

10. * * * Focus on target items – Ratio of correct target responses • Prepositions: Significant difference between TD and SLI in both languages. • Inflections: Significant difference between TD and SLI only in Hebrew. • No quantitative difference was found between Bilingual SLIs and Monolingual SLIs.

11. Qualitative Analysis: Type of Errors

12. Verb inflections:Omissions and substitutions Type of error in raw numbers [N=total number of items] Substitution - Wrong Inflection Omission - No inflectional suffix

13. Inflection Errors - Summary • Bilingual children with SLI have more errors and a wider variety of errors when compared with TD bilinguals. • English: Both SLI and TD use RIs, but only the SLI use the wrong tense. • Hebrew: • Both SLI and TD substitute wrong inflections, but only SLI omit inflections. Bilingual children with SLI omit more than monolingual children with SLI. • TD score significantly better than SLI with a significant difference in the percentage of wrong inflections in all 5 inflection categories in Hebrew.

14. * * * Errors by Preposition Type • Bilingual Children with SLI have significantly more errors in English in the use of Obligatory prepositions than TD bilinguals, with no difference in Hebrew. • Monolingual children with SLI have more errors in Hebrew in the use of Obligatory prepositions than Bilingual Children with SLI

15. * * * Type of Errors – by Groups • Bilingual Children with SLI have significantly more errors which are not due to Code Interference (both substitutions and omissions TD=0) than TD children. • Monolinguals with SLI have significantly more omissions than Bilingual Children with SLI

16. Type of Errors by Preposition Type * *

17. Preposition Errors - Summary • More errors for OBLIGATORY than FREE prepositions; • Non-CI omissions found ONLY for SLI children • TD have more CI-substitutions, while SLI have more non-CI substitutions. • Hebrew: a significant difference between TD and Bi-SLI for non-CI omission of obligatory prepositions. Mono-SLI have significantly more omissions of both types of prepositions • English: a significant difference between TD and Bi-SLI in the use of obligatory prepositions, due to a significant difference in the use of non-CI substitutions

18. Major Findings • Substitutions and omissions due to code interference are typical for TD bilingual children. • Omissions of inflections in Hebrew are unique to children with SLI and are more frequent in bilingual children with SLI • Non-CI preposition substitution errors are more prevalent among children with SLI due to a significant difference in their performance with OBLIGATORY-preps • Non-CI omission errors are unique to children with SLI, both bilingual and monolingual

19. Discussion

20. Prepositions: Non-CI Substitutions • TD children: use synonyms, so substitutions are semantically based and can be attributed to bilingual processing. • Children with SLI: • Free prepositions - The semantics of the adverbial helps the child choose the correct preposition, and thus there are fewer errors. • Obligatory prepositions - A preposition is needed (Botwinik-Rotem 2004), but due to competing processing demands they cannot figure out which preposition it is. In the absence of a semantic basis for the choice, they pick up any preposition, with preference for in and on, which are semanticaly less restricted.

21. Preposition: Omissions • Some omission errors can be explained by code interference • The restriction of omission errors which cannot be explained by code interference to the SLI population, and the monolingual omission errors stem from an impairment in the child’s linguistic representation.

22. Inflections • Omissions of inflections in English are in places where the inflection does not add to the meaning of the sentence. • Inflections in Hebrew carry the semantics of person and tense. Monolingual children with SLI omit these inflections infrequently. • In the bilingual context, when L1 has no person features, children with SLI corelate these suffixes with tense only, which is also encoded in Hebrew by the interdigited vowel pattern, making the suffix semantically redundant. In this case, bilingualism has an additive value.

23. Conclusion • Non-CI omissions and substitutions emerge from a difficulty in encoding syntactic relations in the absence of semantic motivation. • Omissions - an impairment in the child’s linguistic representation. • Substitutions - competing processing demands

24. Indicators of SLI in bilingual children • Non-CI omission errors are unique to SLI children and can be indicative of SLI. • Non-CI substitution errors in the use of obligatory prepositions and in past tense verb forms in Hebrew are more prevalent among SLI children, and can serve as a secondary indicator for SLI. • Omission of inflections in English, and code switching can hardly serve as a indicators for SLI (only as a quantitative measure).

25. Thank you תודה Mahalo

26. The additive effect of bilingualism • If there is an additive effect of bilingualism and SLI, children with SLI are expected to err more than TD bilinguals and more than monolingual children with SLI. • If there is no such effect, bilingual children with SLI should err more than TD children but show no difference from monolingual children with SLI.