E4
Specific language impairment and early second language acquisition: Differentiating deviations in morphosyntactic acquisition

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Deutsch

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Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Monika Rothweiler

Additional Advisor:

Dr. Annette Kracht

Research Assistants:

Solveig Kroffke
Nadine Stahl

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Multilingual children in migration settings are more often assessed as language disabled than monolingual children. The aim of our research is to identify distinctive morphosyntactic features, which help to distinguish deviations from normal grammatical development of children acquiring German as an early second language (L2) from deviations caused by specific language impairment (SLI). These structures should differ from normal monolingual acquisition as well as from normal L2 acquisition since they are symptomatic of an SLI.
The central question is whether different conditions in acquisition (L2-context vs. SLI) lead to distinguishable deviations in the acquisition of German or not. Furthermore we ask whether the same areas of grammar are affected. If the same morphosyntactic areas will be affected, it must be settled whether we can find differing error patterns. If interindividual patterns can be established, they could be used as morphosyntactic indicators to identify SLI-children on the basis of their second language development.

Methodological procedure
The method of this research is a combined analysis of spontaneous and elicited data in German. The study deals with three groups of children aged 3 to 6. The first group consists of Turkish-speaking children, just starting the acquisition of German. The first language (L1) of the children in both other groups is Turkish, but who have been acquiring German as L2 for one or two years. The children in one of these two groups have been assessed as normal in their acquisition of German, whereas the other group includes children whose language acquisition is judged to be problematic.