Grammatical disorders in German

The morphological characteristics described in the previous section pose significant strains on young, language impaired children who struggle to master verb morphology, verb order and agreement, case markings and so on. There is data showing that agreement marking is one of the main clinical markers of LI in German (Chilla, Rothweiler, & Clahsen, 2012) confirming one of the earliest accounts of LI in German, i.e., the agreement deficit hypothesis, based on which the ability to match features of

different syntactic features within a sentence, such as verb and object, is impaired in LI (Clahsen, 1991). Alternative accounts include the ‘Extended Optional Infinitive’ hypothesis (Rice, Wexler &

Cleave, 1997), as well as the “deficient Complementizer Phrase” (Hamann & Plunkett, 1998) hypothesis. In support of the former theory, there was evidence that LI children omitted copula and used non-finite verbs (e.g., infinitives) in finite contexts more frequently than typically developing children. Hamann (1998) used the CP hypothesis to explain phenomena, such as verb-final placement,

“target-inconsistent” subordinate clauses and more frequent use of finite verbs, which she observed by reviewing the spontaneous speech data from numerous children with LI. Finally, there is evidence that LI in German manifests itself, also, as a decreased ability to understand several question forms, as well as meanings of verbs (Schulz & Tracy, 2011).

26 1.3.2 Phonological and phonetic disorders in German

Speech sound disorders may or may not accompany children with LI. Of great value in this domain is the work of Fox-Boyer and her colleagues (2016), who identified and classified the speech patterns of 276 children with suspected SSD or LI following Dodd’s classification system (1995), i.e., looking at whether speech output was typical but delayed or uncommon (“disordered”) for the children’s age, and/ or whether speech sound production was inconsistent across different trials. Based on her findings, most of the children presented with a delayed rather than a disordered phonological pattern.

Most delays concerned the correct realisation of sounds /ʃ/ and /ç/, velar stops and consonant clusters, whereas most disordered patterns included contact assimilation (/tʁ, dʁ/ → [kʁ, gʁ]), and stopping or general difficulties with fricatives and affricates. Finally, in addition to the disordered phonological patterns, the existence of an inconsistency rating higher than 40%, as suggested by Dodd, along with overall compromised intelligibility constitute indications of phonological disorder in German (Neumann, Rietz & Stenneken, 2016; Albrecht, 2017)

1.3.3 Semantic-lexical disorders in German

LI in German is often associated with lexical deficits from a very young age. It often manifests itself through the late onset of vocabulary production, the existence of a small lexical inventory or the slow rate of acquisition of new words (Siegmüller & Kauschke, 2006). In many cases, these difficulties continue in early childhood as receptive vocabulary deficits or word-finding difficulties. For instance, LI preschoolers were found to perform worse at a fast-mapping task compared to their TD peers. More specifically, they found it harder to define verbs and recalled less semantic features of the presented items (Skerra, 2009). These difficulties may often lead to the use of generic words, repetitions and circumlocutions. Furthermore, there is an uneven acquisition of nouns compared to verbs and functional words (Rupp, 2013).

In addition, as children become older these semantic deficits frequently influence the understanding and the acquisition of new concepts or more complex sentences. For instance, a study employing event-related brain potentials concluded that LI children exhibited weaker lexical–semantic representations of verbs and their selection restrictions during an auditory comprehension task compared to their TD peers (Sabisch & al, 2006). Conclusively, language-impaired, monolingual German-speaking children are often found to present with semantic deficits that may also coexist with other morphological or phonological difficulties.

27 1.4 Language Impairment in bilinguals

1.4.1 Alternative terminology

Language impairment in bilinguals is often, also, referred to in literature as Primary Language Impairment (PLI) or linguistic disorder and it is differentiated from language difference, which is the

“"the result of the normal process of second language acquisition, and its impact on the development of the second language" (Gillespie, 2015) and describes a typical pathway to bilingual linguistic mastery. In this study, the terms LI, PLI and linguistic disorder will be used interchangeably. While the definition of LI in monolinguals is generally standard, albeit occasional changes, such as the recent emergence of the term DLD (Developmental Language Disorder) reference (Bishop, 2017), consensus as regards the criteria of LI in bilinguals is far less clear. For instance, although some researchers argue that criteria should include performance below one standard deviation on a standardised linguistic assessment on the child’s L2, such as in English (Cleave, Girolametto, Chen & Johnson, 2010), other question the validity of using such normative data and instead propose the use of parental reports (Tsybina & Eriks-Brophy, 2010). The issue of the assessment of LI in bilinguals will be discussed further in chapter 1.8.

A summary of the main criteria of PLI in bilinguals could include: - non-verbal abilities within the average range; absence of oral motor, neurological or developmental difficulties, such as autism; -uneventful medical history and intact hearing and – parental concern regarding development of L1 (and L2); (Hemsley, 2015).

1.4.2 Linking theoretical accounts of LI to bilingual acquisition

As has been discussed earlier, a lot of researchers have pointed out that children with LI and (s equential) bilinguals tend to display commonalities as regards the observed errors in their expressive language. Such commonalities include common developmental patters in the types of error types the make, for instance, in expressive grammar. This makes it quite hard to distinguish between diagnostic features typical of “bilingual” LI and typical L2 acquisition. Furthermore, it is generally accepted that direct comparisons between these groups may result in “diagnostic confounds” and are associated with a risk if they are used as clinical markers; Also, the great variety of the followed methodologies, as well as the diversity of linguistic characteristics of the participants which support a common developmental pathway between LI and bilingual acquisition, further confirm this “risk”.

Taking into consideration the main LI accounts presented earlier, and extending them to bilingual acquisition, (Orgassa, 2009) mentions the following two alternatives: a) if one considers LI to be caused by deficits of their linguistic systems (see representational deficit) it may be expected that

28 bilingual LI children would present with similar profiles with their LI peers in each of their first languages (Paradis, 2007); this prediction has been based on the Disruption-within-Delay account (Rice 2003), which posits that there are some specific morphological elements that are significantly more affected in LI and are, thus, much harder to master both by mono- and bilingual LI children. This unique morphosyntactic deficit, which is in discrepancy with their overall linguistic development, may differentiate children with LI from their younger typically developing peers.

b) One the other hand, if LI is to be attributed to a general processing deficit, one may expect bilingual LI children to be delayed both compared to their typically developing bilingual peers, as well as their monolingual LI peers in each of their languages. This estimate stems from the Generalised Slowing Hypothesis (Kail, 1984) based on which a more global language delay is anticipated as a result of limited processing speed of the linguistic input required for grammar generation. Within this theoretical framework error types are to be of the same type between LI and typically developing children, but LI-bilinguals may present with more severe delays when compared to unimpaired-bilingual and monolingual LI children. Due to the already described effect of specific perceptual characteristics of different languages on certain grammar structures, this account has been extended to incorporate the importance of being able to perceptually finetune to the least salient features of the input languages (Surface Account; Leonard, 2000).

1.4.3 A brief description of the data regarding the profiles of bilinguals with LI per linguistic area

1.4.3.1 Speech sound disorders in bilingual children

Due to the already mentioned difficulties in the study of disordered speech of bilinguals, such as the lack of reference norms and the variability of sound systems there are few studies on this domain.

There are indications of both commonalities and differences as regards the types of errors made by bilingual children compared to monolinguals. For instance, based on some studies the speech output between different groups of bilingual children with SSD did not differ significantly as regards the place or manner of articulation or consonant accuracy (Goldstein, 2015). On the contrary, other data suggested that bilinguals displayed a higher occurrence of certain types of errors compared to monolinguals. Also, different types of errors have been found to be distributed across different

languages (Goldstein, 2015). As mentioned earlier, phenomena such as cross-linguistic influence have been found to affect both segmental and supra-segmental elements of speech.

Where the German language is concerned, despite relatively scarce research in this domain, there is some evidence that an interplay of the type of phonological errors, i.e., atypical versus typical, psycholinguistic skills, such as nonword repetition and phone imitation, and infrequent variations of

29 phones, might determine typical from atypical development in Turkish-German bilinguals (Albrecht, 2017).

1.4.3.2 Semantic deficiencies in bilingual children

The lexical difficulties of bilinguals with PLI have been substantially researched (Kohnert, 2016). Not only is there data suggesting that bilinguals have smaller receptive and expressive vocabulary in both languages compared to their typical peers as measured through picture identification and naming tasks but, also, that these limitations are evident at connected speech level (Iluz-Cohen, 2012). Furthermore, bilinguals with PLI have been shown to have a weaker ability to produce associations between

semantically linked words compared to typical peers, which is an indication of limited overall semantic knowledge. These difficulties have been found to be comparable across languages as

measured through picture description and word association tasks (Sheng et al, 2012) and there is some evidence from bilingual LI children that nouns are more easily retrieved than verbs (Kambanaros, Grohmann & Theodorou, 2013).

As mentioned in a previous chapter, bilingualism may result in increased inter- and intra-lexical errors.

It has been found that language exposure is directly linked with lexical knowledge (McMillen, Griffin, Bedore, & Oppenheim, 2020). In general, such errors, as measured through naming tasks, might be linked to increased competition between double word representations spread between the two

languages, weaker semantic links, poor linguistic skills, as well as poorer vocabularies. As regards the type of errors in each language, these are, also, dependent on the level of linguistic exposure. An interesting study revealed that children produced more semantic errors in their dominant language as opposed to more phonological ones, as well as more “I don’t know”- type of answers in their weaker language (Sheng, Pena, Bedore, & Fiestas, 2014).

The role of DLD on semantic associations and lexical processing was the focus of a recent research by McMillen, Griffin, Peña, Bedore, & Oppenheim (2020).They pointed out that when it comes to naming tasks, bilingual-DLD children underperform on naming tasks, producing more and different types of errors compared to their peers, including more semantic and phonological errors; in the same vein, there is evidence of worse performance on word-association tasks, in the form of fewer or more unrelated associations, which is an indication of poor semantic organisation and retrieval. This is attributed to poorer lexical connectivity between the different semantic networks in the face of high lexical co-activation of competing representations (see chapters 1.1.6.2, 1.2.2) from both languages.

Not surprisingly, speed and accuracy of word-retrieval, i.e., “lexical processing efficiency”, is compromised. In their research, McMillen, and her colleagues (2020) wanted to further investigate indications from previous studies suggesting that individuals tend to be slower and less accurate during naming tasks regarding objects from the same semantic category than compared to stimuli from

30 mixed semantic categories (Dell & O’Seaghdha, 1992). This would be explained by the fact that due to a multitude of reasons the target word is activated to a lesser degree compared to the competing alternatives.

Their results confirmed their original “semantic constraint hypothesis”, based on which higher number of semantic errors are the result of inadequate activation of the target word due to less semantic connections and poorer lexical representations. Their findings showed that (bilingual) DLD children produced more errors than their typically developing peers irrespective of the test language, more phonological errors and no-responses, and that language exposure significantly affected performance on the naming tasks. It also uncovered a semantic blocking effect, by which words from mixed-semantic categories, were less demanding than stimuli from the same-category, as described earlier. In summary, some of the possible, cited interpretations for these results include the confirmation of the semantic constraint hypothesis, as well as the possibility of an important contribution of memory in converting semantic information. With regards to the role of language exposure, the authors

interestingly point out the issue of the measurement of this construct, which in that study was based on an average of the linguistic input and output; this, however, they state, may contradict the evidence that input and output affect bilingual development differently across linguistic domains. A final interesting point of this study was the conclusion that the type of errors might be crucial for

differential diagnosis. For instance, looking out for behaviours of self-correction as an indication of children’s ability to access and produce semantic information, as well as and self-monitoring as evidence of advanced cognitive abilities might point to a different diagnostic decision even in the presence of a few inaccurate answers.

In German, Ll is associated, also, with increased use of generic words, such as “machen” (do), as well as limited use of closed class words, such as pronouns, determiners (prepositions) and conjunctions.

Furthermore, the ability to separate between the different verb classes; i.e. end-product, such as

“aufessen” (eat up) versus process-oriented, such as “malen” (paint) is of high importance for the semantic acquisition of German both at productive and receptive level. Bilinguals with German as additional language have been found to require around 20 contact months to master these specific nuances regarding verb use (Schulz & Tracy, 2011). In addition, the ability to interpret and understand the above-mentioned verb categories correctly has been found to be impaired in German-speaking monolinguals with LI and is, therefore, considered as an important clinical marker for bilinguals, too.

1.4.3.3 Sentence structure weaknesses in bilingual children

Bilinguals with LI have been reported to produce shorter utterances, a larger number of grammatical errors and have weaker sentence comprehension. As Kohnert points out, however, most of the studies in this area have been conducted in one of the children’s language. Studies that have included both

31 languages have shown that bilinguals with LI appear to develop their morphological system following a similar order as typically developing bilinguals, albeit more slowly (Salameh et al, 2014). In

addition, bilinguals with LI produce shorter mean length of utterance (MLU) compared to bilingual children without LI. Where narrative skills are concerned, typically developing bilinguals have been found to make more advanced use of macrostructural elements during story retell tasks than bilinguals with LI. Finally, story comprehension is, also, impaired in bilinguals with LI (Kohnert, 2016).

In German, there is evidence that typically developing bilinguals, generally, also, acquire the specific rules of sentence assembly mentioned earlier, such as verb placement, in a comparable manner with monolinguals; therefore, any issues concerning the patterns of acquisition of said rules, would indicate the possibility of LI in bilinguals (Schulz & Tracy, 2011). Moreover, the same can be said as regards the mastery of Subject-Verb agreement, and correct verb inflection, which are both clinical markers of LI; this information, along with the fact early sequential bilinguals may acquire rules of basic verb placement within less than a contact year with German, has been employed as an additional, informal criterion of LI in this population (Rothweiler, 2006; Tracy & Thoma, 2009).

1.4.3.4 General long-term language growth

Kohnert (2016) points out an interesting observation regarding the developmental patterns of acquisition between typically developing (sequential) bilinguals and language impaired ones; in the former case the L2, if it is the majority language, will reach a higher proficiency level compared to the minority, L1 that will nonetheless continue to develop, even though less rapidly. On the other hand, in the case of LI children, there are indications that L1 might be more likely to be lost or deteriorate, leading to “linguistic attrition”, if consistent input is not ensured (Restreppo & Kruth, 2000).

1.5 Bilingualism and cognition

The role of bilingualism and its role in shaping children’s mental abilities has been long researched, especially in respect to the cognitive advantages bilingual children may present over their monolingual peers.

Some of the first studies in this domain focused on the exploration of the relationship between bilingualism and metalinguistic awareness (which along with metalinguistic knowledge and ability form the construct metalinguistic), i.e., the ability to consciously reflect on the nature of the structure of language (Bialystok, 2001). One of the earliest well documented advantages of bilingual children refers to the ability to understand the nature between words and their -arbitrary- meanings, as was

32 established by the replication of the ‘sun-moon’ test by Piaget (1929), (Cummins, 1978; Bialystok, 1988).

Further studies confirmed that bilingual children performed better at tasks of lexical and syntactic awareness, such as judging the acceptability of certain types of sentences. Subsequent experiments, however, yielded evidence according to which, bilingualism facilitated the speed of development of syntactic understanding but not its course (Galambos & Goldin-Meadow, 1990).

Other scholars have investigated the role of bilingualism and phonological awareness tasks with some mixed results with bilingual children having an advantage in simple tasks requiring phonemic

segmentation but not on other types of relevant tasks (Bialystok, Majumder, & Martin,2003). It has been proposed that interpreting such mixed results under the perspective of linguistic proficiency may clarify the identified observed discrepancies. For instance, there is some evidence that bilingualism may be advantageous in relation to metalinguistic tasks only for balanced bilinguals but not for children with minimal exposure to the second language (Bialystok, 2001; Gathercole, 1997).

Furthermore, the relative balance between the two languages, as well as the type of chosen tasks affect the observed results. There is consistent evidence that on studies with carefully chosen conditions targeting specifically linguistic (i.e., representational) tasks while controlling (or not) for attentional control (processing), bilingual children outperformed monolingual ones during the tasks that required increased attention but not during the purely “linguistic tasks” (Bialystok, 2001). Here are two examples of such studies: During an assessment task of word recognition, the purely “linguistic “ condition involved counting of words of sentences that were scrambled up and, thus, did not

contribute to the meaning of the sentence; the “attentionally demanding” condition, on the other hand, included meaningful sentences, which the children would need to ignore -by controlling their

attention- in order to successfully count the words and succeed in this task (Bialystok, 1986b). Also, based on another study including grammatical judgment tasks bilingual children had better outcomes compared to monolinguals when linguistic processing, such as tolerating purposeful semantic or syntactic errors, was required for successful completion of an exercise, compared to a condition of pure linguistic analysis that did not pose such attentional requirements (Cromdal, 1999; Bialystok, 2001).

Based on these examples, it becomes clear why scholars have tried to interpret bilingual children’s differential advantage on selective tasks, such as the one mentioned earlier, under the scope of a theory

Based on these examples, it becomes clear why scholars have tried to interpret bilingual children’s differential advantage on selective tasks, such as the one mentioned earlier, under the scope of a theory