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The effects of language impairment on the use of direct object pronouns and verb inflections in heritage Spanish speakers: A look at attrition, incomplete acquisition and maintenance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

PEGGY F. JACOBSON
PEGGY F. JACOBSON*
Affiliation:
St John's University
*
Address for correspondence: Peggy F. Jacobson, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 344J St John Hall, St. John's University, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Queens, NY 11439jacobsop@stjohns.edu
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Abstract

This study examined object clitic pronouns (OCPs) and verb inflections in twenty-five school-age children with typical development (TD) and twenty children with bilingual language impairment (BLI). MANOVA and ANOVA were used to explore differences according to grade level and language status (TD vs. BLI). Although children with BLI produced higher rates of grammatical errors overall, accuracy on number and gender assignment for OCPs was better for both groups in the higher grades. Although the rate of verb inflection errors did not differ for children with TD and BLI in the lower grades, a significant interaction yielded higher error rates on subject–verb agreement for third person singular and plural inflections in the later grades for children with BLI. Greater accuracy on OCP use in later grades weakens claims that bilingualism exacerbates language impairment. For BLI, whether incomplete acquisition or delayed development is the determining factor for verb inflection errors remains undetermined.

Keywords

bilingual language impairmentSpanish morphologyincomplete acquisition
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Special Issue 1: Bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment , January 2012 , pp. 22 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by Grant 5R03DC 07018-02 from the National Institutes of Health / National Institute on Deafness and other Communicative Disorders. The author is grateful to the sponsors and organizers of the International Symposium on Bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment, to Sharon Armon Lotem and anonymous reviewers for their editorial guidance, to Richard Schwartz for help with the methodological design, to David Livert for the statistical analysis, and to research assistants Edith Tsouri and Jessica Greco. Deep gratitude is also extended to the children who participated.

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