4.1 Phonology
For clarification purposes, it should be noted that in this section the errors that are associated with a delay are presented in green and those that are mostly associated with a disorder in red, both in the text and in table 21.
As mentioned in chapter 1.3.1., according to Fox-Boyer’s (2016) classification of the speech patterns of 276 children with suspected SSD or LI -who followed Dodd’s system (1995)-, between typical but delayed speech output and uncommon (“disordered ”) output, and/ or whether speech sound
production was inconsistent across different trials, the following was observed: 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: (/f, v, s, z, ʃ, ç, x, R, h, pf, ts/).
Finally, in addition to the disordered phonological patterns, special reference should be made to the role of the inconsistency rate between a child’s different realisations of a phoneme or word (before and after modelling) during the testing situation as described in the Introduction (1.3.1) and Results
sections (3.1.2). As mentioned earlier, the existence of an inconsistency rate higher than 40%, as suggested by Dodd, along with overall compromised intelligibility, constitute indications of phonological disorder in German (Neumann, Rietz & Stenneken, 2016 in Albrecht, 2017).
Table 21. Number (and percentage) of children per group and per phonological process
Group /ʃ/ clusters contact
Our findings (Table 21) indicate that the caseload group demonstrated much higher percentages of disordered patterns (color coded in red), such as initial consonant deletion (ICD), contact assimilation, as well as backing, but equal or lower percentages of less deviant processes (colour coded in green), such as difficulties with clusters and the realisation of sound /ʃ/, compared to the control group. It should be noted that in the table above several children of both groups presented errors from several categories. All errors were noted separately, accordingly. It is important to acknowledge the issues
106 related to the use of percentage differences with a small sample and, therefore, it is important to treat our conclusions with caution and as a mere indication.
On the other hand, as regards the control group more children exhibited errors that have been found to be consistent with a delay rather than a disorder, i.e., issues with clusters and production of /ʃ/.
Where the inconsistency 40% “criterion” is concerned (Dodd, 1995), this appears to be “met” by a higher proportion of the caseload children: 37.5% of the caseload group (M =35.7, SD = 13.9) earned a score of 40% or higher compared to 14.8% of the control group (M = 18.1, SD = 15), confirming the aforementioned findings (Table 22; Figure 8). In other words, the significant quantitative difference presented earlier between the mean Inconsistency scores of the two groups (F=19.95, p < .001), also, reflects a qualitative difference of clinical importance between the two groups. For reference, the calculation of this rate was based on children’s different production of sounds during the two naming phases, using the formula (a + b) * 100, whereby (a) represented the sum of all the sounds that were produced differently and (b) the sum of all produced words (b).
Table 22. Percentages of “red-flag” inconsistency rates* per group
Figure 8. Bar graphof “red-flag” inconsistency rates* per group Group % of Inconsistency scores = or > than 40%
Caseload 37.5 Control 14.8
107 4.2 Differences between the two groups on Semantic and Morphological ability based on
performance on the Lise-DaZ subtests
In German, Ll is associated with limited use of closed class words, such as pronouns, determiners (prepositions) and conjunctions (Schulz & Tracy, 2011).
This was confirmed in all tested areas, i.e., prepositions-conjunctions, as the suspected LI group (caseload) produced in both cases less items per category. These differences did not reach significance with regards to the Subtest “Conjunctions” but they are nonetheless existing ( Mcaseload = .25, Mcontrol = 1.4; F(1, 36) = 2.64, p = .56)).
Also, for the Subtest Prepositions (Mcaseload = 1.5, Mcontrol = 2.5); F(1, 36) = 1.2, p =.28)). Lack of significance may be attributed to the sample size.
Furthermore, the ability to differentiate and employ end-product verb categories, such as “aufessen”
(eat up) and process-oriented, such as “malen” (eat up) correctly has been found to be impaired in German-speaking monolinguals with LI and is, therefore, considered as an important clinical marker for bilinguals as regards potential linguistic difficulties.
The subtest Comprehension of verbs evaluates to what extent a child can distinguish between process-oriented and final-state-process-oriented verbs. Final state verbs and process verbs are evaluated separately in this subtest through so-called truth judgment value tasks, which ensure the evaluation of acquisition of the tested structures regardless of the expressive ability. For each correct answer, a point is given, which gives the total the raw value. For each verb class six points can be achieved, whereby it can be assumed that there is a need for support as soon as fewer than five answers are correct per verb class (Bauer, 2012). Therefore, the maximum raw score total per group is 12. Considering this raw score as a “threshold” of need for clinical support, i.e., five correct answers per group, it was decided to calculate the percentage of children of each group that obtained an overall raw score of a minimum of 11 (so that at least for one group of verbs the raw score would be 5 or 6) as an indication of adequate skills in this area.
Interestingly, the children that earned a total score of 11 corresponded to 28.6% (4 children) of the caseload group and 15% (4 children) of the control, whereas the maximum possible score, i.e., 12 was obtained by 15.4% (4 children) of the control group and by 14.3 % (2 children) of the caseload. In other words, from a qualitative point of view there was not a big difference between the two groups regarding the number of verbs they understood. Overall, it should be noted that regarding the caseload group, there was a higher frequency of relatively “extreme” responses, i.e., less of an even distribution compared to the control group (Table 22).
108 Figure 9. Frequency of raw scores of each group on the subscale Comprehension of verbs
In addition, as already mentioned in section 1.3, the “sentence bracket” system, whereby the predicate in the main clause has infinite (non-conjugate) parts in addition to the finite verb (the conjugated verb form) and the left sentence bracket typically contains finite verbs or subordinating conjunctions should be considered in this section because its mastery is considered especially hard for LI children (Shulz &
Tracy, 2011).
Children’s skills on this area, as mentioned earlier, was measured through to the ordinal item, Sentence Assembly, i.e., the level of produced sentence structures: although the observed group difference was non-significant, probably due to the small sample size of children with appropriate verbal responses (NControl= 20, NCaseload=11), there was some differentiation. This is indicated through the Mann-Whitney Test (U = 77.5, p = .80) and reflected by the median performance of each group: Mdn (caseload) = 2 compared to Mdn (control) = 3, as well as the respective (non-parametric) effect size (r = .28), which is considered as moderate. This difference in sentence type structure is considerable from a qualitative point of view because it indicates that caseload children tended to use Level II phrases whereas the control group used the more advanced Level III sentence structure. For reference, usually, at Level II, two-word combinations appear that already follow the “typical” German word placement (with the verb at the end of the phrase), which is a predecessor of the “right” sentence structure. During that stage appear words, such as “auch” (also) and “nicht” (not). Level III typically appears around 2-2;5 and is marked by the use of verbs at the V2 position, which is considered as a main sentence/ clause.
Rarely, there is use of subordinate clauses.
In conclusion, this qualitative difference partly confirms Schulz’s observation that mastery of correct verb placement and of a more advanced sentence structure are complicated for LI children.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Number of children
Raw score
Frequency of raw scores on the subtest Comprehension of verbs
Control Caseload
109 Finally, as regards mastery of Subject Verb Agreement, which is also an important feature of LI as measured through the SV Agreement subtest of the Lise-DaZ, unfortunately, no meaningful conclusions might be due to the extremely low number of caseload children (N=3) that “completed”
this section.
110