Assessing Multilingual Children: Disentangling Bilingualism from Language Impairment (Communication Disorders Across Languages): 13 - Softcover

Sharon Armon-Lotem; Jan De Jong; Natalia Meir

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783093110 ISBN 13: 9781783093113

Publisher: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 2015

Synopsis

Second language learners often produce language forms resembling those of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). At present, medical, language and educational professionals have only limited diagnostic instruments to distinguish language impaired migrant children from those who will eventually catch up with their monolingual peers. This book presents a comprehensive set of tools for assessing the linguistic abilities of bilingual children. It aims to disentangle effects of bilingualism from those of SLI, making use of both models of bilingualism and models of language impairment. The book's methods-oriented focus will make it an essential handbook for practitioners who look for measures which could be adapted to a variety of languages in diverse communities, as well as academic researchers.

About this title

About the Author

Sharon Armon-Lotem is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics and The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar Ilan University, Israel. Jan de Jong is Assistant Professor at the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Natalia Meir is currently working on her PhD in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Assessing Multilingual Children

Disentangling Bilingualism from Language Impairment

By Sharon Armon-Lotem, Jan de Jong, Natalia Meir

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2015 Sharon Armon-Lotem, Jan de Jong, Natalia Meir and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78309-311-3

Contents

Contributors, 
Introduction Sharon Armon-Lotem and Jan de Jong, 
Part 1: Syntax and Its Interfaces, 
1 Elicitation Task for Subject–Verb Agreement Jan de Jong, 
2 Contrastive Elicitation Task for Testing Case Marking Esther Ruigendijk, 
3 Elicited Production of Object Clitics Philippe Prévost, 
4 Comprehension of Exhaustive Wh-Questions Petra Schulz, 
5 Sentence Repetition Theodoros Marinis and Sharon Armon-Lotem, 
Part 2: Phonological and Lexical Processing, 
6 Non-Word Repetition Shula Chiat, 
7 Using Parental Report to Assess Early Lexical Production in Children Exposed to More Than One Language Daniela Gatt, Ciara O'Toole and Ewa Haman, 
8 Designing Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs) for Bilingual Preschool Children Ewa Haman, Magdalena Luniewska and Barbara Pomiechowska, 
Part 3: Beyond Modality, 
9 Assessment of Narrative Abilities in Bilingual Children Natalia Gagarina, Daleen Klop, Sari Kunnari, Koula Tantele, Taina Välimaa, Ingrida Balciu-niene?, Ute Bohnacker and Joel Walters, 
10 Executive Functions in the Assessment of Bilingual Children with Language Impairment Kristine Jensen de Lopéz and Anne E. Baker, 
Part 4: From Theory to Practice, 
11 Clinical Use of Parental Questionnaires in Multilingual Contexts Laurice Tuller, 
12 Proposed Diagnostic Procedures for Use in Bilingual and Cross-Linguistic Contexts Elin Thordardottir, 
Language Index, 
Subject Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Elicitation Task for Subject–Verb Agreement

Jan de Jong

The marking of verbs for grammatical features of the subject of a sentence is called subject–verb agreement. Features that are marked this way are number, person and sometimes gender. Marking of agreement may be fused with tense. For instance, the third person singular –s in English verbs is used only for the present tense. Importantly, agreement is an inflection that is determined by the syntactic context in which the verb is used (contextual inflection; Booij, 1994).

The agreement paradigm is different for each language where agreement occurs. Some languages (notably English) have very sparse paradigms, while other languages (e.g. Italian) have paradigmatic cells not only for singular and plural but also for first, second and third person. Slovene, for instance, has dual as well as plural marking. On the other hand, some languages (e.g. Swedish) do not have verb agreement morphology (although tense is marked in Swedish). There are also within-language differences between the marking for agreement of present and past.

Subject–Verb Agreement as a Vulnerable Area in Specific Language Impairment

Verb morphology is known to be a vulnerable domain in specific language impairment (SLI) in many languages, though certainly not in all: in some languages, noun morphology is more vulnerable than verb morphology (cf. Chapter 2 on case morphology). There are also cross-linguistic differences in the severity of verb agreement difficulties in SLI. Research by Leonard (1998) has revealed that inflection is better preserved if it is highly salient in the target language. The same is true for languages that have rich (or uniform) morphology. Together, these characteristics make agreement a strong cue in such languages. According to Leonard, this explains, for instance, why accuracy rates for inflection on verbs are much higher in the output of children with SLI in Italian than in English.

In the languages where verb inflection is affected, difficulties with verbal morphology are often seen as a reliable marker of SLI. Some authors claim that this marker should be identified with tense rather than agreement (Rice et al., 1995). However, the language for which the claim of tense as a clinical marker has most consistently been made, English, does not distinguish between overt marking of (present) tense and agreement, as in third person singular –s (the only overt affix in the present tense inflectional paradigm).

Other researchers, notably Clahsen (2008), claim that agreement problems outnumber tense problems and that the reverse pattern, i.e. impaired tense marking and intact subject–verb agreement marking, does not seem to exist in SLI (Clahsen, 2008: 176). In earlier work, Clahsen (1992) proposed that the contextual nature of verb agreement, captured in the Control Agreement Principle, is where the weakness of children with SLI should be located. This would explain why other features, such as plural marking on nouns, are better preserved in SLI: number marking on nouns is not contextual.

Tense and agreement errors may show as omissions or substitutions of inflectional morphemes. In English, a language with little overt marking in the first place, omission is the dominant error type. In languages with a more elaborate verb paradigm, substitutions are also found. Recently, Clahsen (2008) has suggested that problems in agreement may not show across the board, but rather in specific cells of the agreement paradigm. These affected cells may be language specific. This, again, may be explained alternatively by differential patterns of saliency (Bedore & Leonard, 1996). Another factor concerns the number and complexity of features to be marked. In Hebrew, past tense forms are marked for person, number and gender; in the present tense, person is not marked. Dromi et al. (1999) showed that this led to a discrepancy in performance for the present and past tense. They found that errors in second person past tense (masculine and feminine, singular and plural), as well as errors in present tense plural feminine, revealed differences between children with SLI and typically developing (TD) children. They characterised the errors as feature simplification/reduction since they involved omission of the person marking in the past and the number or gender marking in the present.

When choosing a test domain for verb morphology that is valid across languages, however, agreement is a proper target, languages that lack agreement notwithstanding. The variation of inflectional paradigms makes it a fruitful area for research into the sources of linguistic disability in SLI. Studies on agreement morphology in monolingual children with SLI have addressed typologically different languages like German (Clahsen, 2008; Rothweiler et al., 2012), Hebrew (Dromi et al., 1999), Spanish (Bedore & Leonard, 2001), Italian (Leonard et al., 1992), Finnish (Kunnari et al., 2011), French (Franck et al., 2004) and Greek (Stavrakaki et al., 2008). These studies concern different linguistic contexts, test different hypotheses and sometimes propose different explanations for agreement difficulties in SLI. Together, however, they demonstrate that agreement morphology is a domain that warrants investigation when assessing the linguistic profile of SLI.

Agreement morphology is also sometimes found to be weak in bilingual children without language impairment (e.g. Paradis & Crago, 2000, 2003). This observation leads to a diagnostic confound: are agreement difficulties in bilingual children with language delay due to their bilingualism or are they indicative of SLI?

In a study done on Dutch language production in Turkish–Dutch bilingual children (Orgassa, 2009), shortcomings in agreement morphology were shown to be typical of both monolingual and bilingual children with SLI. No differences were found between monolingual and bilingual TD children. Rothweiler et al. (2012) found similar patterns in Turkish–German children. In their study, Rothweiler et al. (2012: 42) found agreement problems in children with SLI who were grammatically quite advanced 'in that they consistently produced subordinate clauses and/or wh-questions from the first recording onwards'. Such findings suggest that verbal morphology shows promise of being an index of SLI regardless of the child's status as a bilingual or monolingual speaker of the language. In the context of this volume, dealing as it does with the assessment of SLI in a bilingual context, it provides another reason for including agreement morphology in the test repertoire.

Task Design: The General Format

Grammatical morphology is often tested by supplying sentences for the child to complete (a cloze procedure). However, this procedure has its drawbacks. An important one concerns the structure of the stimulus. Some exemplary items can show this.

In the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI; Rice & Wexler, 2001), children are asked to complete sentence frames like:

(1) 'Here is a singer. Tell me what a singer does'.

Conti-Ramsden et al. (2001) uses another sentence frame to elicit a finite form:

(2) 'Sailors sail. This man is a sailor, so every day he (sails)'.

Stimuli may have different restrictions cross-linguistically. If applied to Dutch (or German), two problems arise here. Stimulus (1) can easily elicit an infinitive (zingen [Dutch] or singen [German], 'sing') instead of an inflected verb. Stimulus (2) cannot be translated into a similar frame in Dutch, since in Dutch a fronted temporal marker (like 'every day') leads to inversion of subject and verb. Whereas in English, one can supply the subject after which the child completes the sentence with a verb, in Dutch the verb, i.e. the very target of the task, is the first element after the temporal phrase so the verb cannot be elicited by prompting the subject. This is a language-specific problem, but similar phenomena are found in other languages, with similar or different word order patterns. Another problem with, for instance, the sentence frame (1) from the TEGI, is that it can only be used for the elicitation of third person verb forms. For English, this is sufficient, but it does not work for languages with richer agreement paradigms. The same is true for another useful device, contrastive stimuli, like the ones used in the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV; Seymour et al., 2003): 'The boys ride scooters, but not the girl. She ...'.

In conclusion, the best way to create a task that is applicable across languages is to elicit a full sentence from the child.

Another requirement that derives from typological considerations is that the target verb be transitive. In some languages (again, Dutch, and to a lesser extent German) the presence of an object in the sentence can be used to establish whether the verb is in second or final position. Verb position, in these languages, correlates with verb form (the correlation is stronger in Dutch than in German; examples in Clahsen [1988] show that in German, more instances are found of finite forms in final position).

This can be illustrated by two utterances from a Dutch girl with SLI (aged 7;5) taken from a study by de Jong (1999):

(3) toen papa en mama klap-en then papa and mama applaud.INF or .PRS-PL

(4) mama kast open-doen mama cupboard open.do.INF

In early Dutch child language, children use infinitives rather than finite forms. They consistently use these infinitival forms in utterance-final position. Finite forms occur in second position. However, in (3), final position cannot be distinguished from second position. In (4), the second position is taken by the object and thus the verb is unambiguously final. Importantly, the infinitive form is homonymous: the plural form is identical. The implication then is that, given the form–position correlation, in (3) the verb could be inflected for number, in (4) it cannot. The occurrence of utterances like (4) throughout the language sample supports the observation that this child manifests extended use of root infinitives (and also suggests that (3) should have an infinitival reading rather than a plural interpretation).

The decisions made about the design (eliciting full sentences, transitive verbs) allow for a procedure that can be carried out in as many languages as possible, so not many language-specific adaptations are necessary. Another decision that had to be made was that all cells of the paradigm (not just third, but also first and second person) should be included, given the variation across languages. This limited the use of stimuli like those in (1) and (2).

For the verbs included, the criterion was that they had an equivalent in each of the languages for which the task was created. Of course, this does not guarantee that stimuli are fully equivalent across languages. Additional criteria or considerations might hold for other languages and these may lead to deviations from the procedure, to ensure that no other variables interfere with the elicitation of agreement proper. For example, the use of pronouns in the task could affect performance in those languages in which the object pronoun takes the form of a clitic (see Chapter 3, this volume): clitics are known to be vulnerable in the language of children with SLI. Another variable is the influence of morphophonology on specific test items (see Pruitt & Oetting, 2009). It may be that the phonology of a particular verb stem makes it hard to identify the agreement marker as a separate morpheme, so that other verb stems are preferable. The verbs selected were 'wash' (as a practice item), 'push', 'pull', 'hug', 'pinch', 'tickle'. All resulting items are listed in Table 1.1. The next section will describe the way they are elicited.

Task Design: Procedure

The procedure is a picture description task. As Table 1.1 shows, third as well as first and second person are elicited. While elicitation of third person by picture description is a common and natural procedure, first and second person require a form of role play, by which the child is encouraged to take the perspective of one of the characters in the picture ('I') while the experimenter has a different role ('you'). The following procedure was designed to create that referential contrast.

The materials used are: two ring binders A5, with two holes, one with straps or a rubber band to enable setting it upright; stickers (insignia) in the form of a silver star, a red heart, a blue triangle; test pictures A5 landscape, holes at top, in a double set; an audio recording device; a form with all items; instruction text; and a see-through ziplock bag.

The setting is as follows: the child and the experimenter are sitting opposite each other. The booklet with the pictures and the practice items about washing are on the table and the loose experimental pictures are in a see-through zipped bag.

The experimenter starts by saying: 'This is a game about putting together a book with pictures. You have the book with the pictures in the right order, but look, my book has fallen apart. I want you to help me to put my book together. But let's have a look at the pictures first. Look, this person has a grey star, this one has a red heart. I will be one of them and you will be the other one. Which one would you like to be?' (see Figure 1.1).

The child then makes a choice, after which the experimenter introduces the practice items to familiarise the child with the procedure and, importantly, with the role that the child and the experimenter will take during the task:

'Great, here is the silver/red star/heart for you and I take the silver/red star/heart. So, the book is about us. Let's see what we are doing. In this picture I wash you, and in this picture you wash me. So, we need to be careful because there are many pictures about washing.

Oh, look, in this picture there is someone else and he has a blue triangle. Here he is washing you and here I am washing him'.

Note that besides the experimenter and the child ('you' and 'I') there is a third person involved ('someone else') to elicit third person singular ('he'). Now the experimenter takes the experimental pictures out of the bag and puts them on the table.

Experimenter: 'Now let's have a look at these pictures. These are about pushing and these are about pulling. These are about pinching and these are about tickling. We have hugging as well. So, we really need to be careful because there are different people doing different things.

Let's first sort them by what they are doing. Can you find pictures about hugging/tickling/pushing/pulling/pinching/washing?'.

The experimenter then takes the items with washing, which are the practice items and uses the following four as practice.

'Show me a picture with the boy. So, here "he washes you", and now you look at this one and you say: "He washes me". Now what happens in this picture? And what happens in this picture?'. Thus, the child is asked to describe two pictures as practice items: You wash him, I wash you.

The practice items are used to ensure that:

• The I/you contrast is working well.

• The verb used by the child is not progressive and is of the target tense.

• Both subject and object are overtly realised by the child.

If the child gets these three things right at least in the last practice trial, the experimenter moves to the experimental trials. If the child does not, the practice trials are repeated.

In the experimental trials, the experimenter guides the child as follows: 'To do this fast, you take the book and I take the cards. You tell me what is on the pictures and I put them in order to fix my book'.

'What happens on the first picture?'

'What happens next?'

Task Design: Simplified Procedure

The task as described above depends on the use of insignia (star, heart, triangle) to identify the persons in the picture. As the description of the task shows, the design requires that the child as well as the test administrator takes roles. The disadvantage of this procedure is that it demands some theory of mind skills; it is a pretend game. These skills are not always fully available to children with language impairment. Piloting has shown that the task can also be carried out with one sign per picture (only for I, you; he being by default the 'other person') or even without insignia.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Assessing Multilingual Children by Sharon Armon-Lotem, Jan de Jong, Natalia Meir. Copyright © 2015 Sharon Armon-Lotem, Jan de Jong, Natalia Meir and the authors of individual chapters. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters Ltd
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783093110
• ISBN 13: 9781783093113
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376
• Editor: Sharon Armon-Lotem, Jan De Jong, Natalia Meir