Parsing the passive: comparing children with Specific Language Impairment to sequential bilingual children

25 monolingual (L1) children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), 32 sequential bilingual (L2) children, and 29 L1 controls completed the Test of Active & Passive Sentences-Revised (van der Lely, 1996) and the self-paced listening task with picture verification for actives and passives (Marinis, 2007). These revealed important between-group differences in both tasks. The children with SLI showed difficulties in both actives and passives when they had to reanalyse thematic roles on-line. Their error pattern provided evidence for working memory limitations. The L2 children showed difficulties only in passives both on-line and off-line. We suggest that these relate to the complex syntactic algorithm in passives and reflect an earlier developmental stage due to reduced exposure to the L2. The results are discussed in relation to theories of SLI and can be best accommodated within accounts proposing that difficulties in the comprehension of passives stem from processing limitations

Language disabilities in children and adolescents

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Language assessment & intervention for the learning disabled

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A Nonword Repetition Task to Assess Bilingual Children’s Phonology

International audienceChildren with specific language impairment (SLI) are particularly sensitive to phonological complexity in their language. Their performance drops when there are specific phonological structures or when complexity increases. A nonword repetition (NWR) test, which aims to assess the phonology of bilingual speakers with and without SLI, should include phonological properties that are independent of the language and phonological properties whose complexity is quantifiable. The methodology and constraints related to the creation of a NWR test named LITMUS-NWR-FRENCH, which combines these two objectives, are presented. This task was tested on a population of 67 children, 5½ to 8½ years old, bilingual and monolingual, with and without SLI, having in common French as L1 or L2. Results show that the LITMUS-NWR-FRENCH task differentiates between children with and without SLI in the context of bilingualism. It also shows the influence and importance of phonological complexity in children with SLI