Chondrogianni Vasiliki, John Nerys
School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Bangor University, Bangor, UK.
Int J Lang Commun Disord. 2018 May;53(3):495-514. doi: 10.1111/1460-6984.12363. Epub 2018 Jan 12.
Grammatical morphology has been shown to be problematic for children with specific language impairment (SLI) or developmental language disorder (DLD). Most research on this topic comes from widely spoken languages, such as English. Despite Welsh being the most extensively spoken indigenous in the UK after English, and Wales being the only official bilingual country in the UK, our knowledge about the morphosyntactic areas of Welsh that may pose problems for Welsh-speaking children with SLI is limited. Currently, Welsh-speaking speech and language therapists (SLTs) are heavily reliant on the use of informally translated English assessments. This can inadvertently result in a failure to take aspects of Welsh morphosyntax into account that are critical for the assessment and treatment of Welsh-speaking children.
This is the first study to examine how Welsh-English bilingual children of early school age with typical development (bi-TD) and with SLI (bi-SLI) perform on production tasks targeting verbal and nominal morphology in Welsh. We targeted areas of Welsh morphosyntax that could potentially be vulnerable for Welsh-speaking children with or at risk of language impairment, such as tense marking and plural formation, and assessed their diagnostic potential.
METHODS & PROCEDURES: Twenty-eight Welsh-dominant bilingual children participated in the study: 10 bi-SLI and 18 bi-TD. They were administered three elicitation tasks targeting the production of verbal (compound and synthetic past tense) and nominal (plural) morphology in Welsh.
OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The bi-SLI children performed worse than their bi-TD peers across all three tasks. They produced more uninflected verbs in the elicited-production task and were less likely to be prompted to produce the synthetic past, which is a concatenating, low-frequency form of the past tense. They also over-regularized less in the context of plural nouns, and when they did, they opted for high-frequency suffixes.
CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: By focusing on aspects of morphosyntactic development which are unique to Welsh, we have increased existing about how verbal and nominal morphology are acquired in Welsh-speaking bi-SLI and bi-TD children. The present results point towards productivity problems for Welsh-speaking bi-SLI children who are adversely influenced by low-frequency structures and fail to over-regularize in the context of verbal and nominal concatenating morphology. From a clinical perspective, targeting synthetic past-tense forms through a prompting task may be a promising assessment and intervention tool that future studies could explore further.
语法形态学已被证明对患有特定语言障碍（SLI）或发育性语言障碍（DLD）的儿童来说是个难题。关于这一主题的大多数研究都来自广泛使用的语言，如英语。尽管威尔士语是英国仅次于英语的使用最广泛的本土语言，且威尔士是英国唯一的官方双语国家，但我们对威尔士语中可能给说威尔士语的SLI儿童带来问题的形态句法领域的了解有限。目前，说威尔士语的言语和语言治疗师（SLT）严重依赖非正式翻译的英语评估。这可能会无意中导致未能考虑到威尔士语形态句法中对说威尔士语儿童的评估和治疗至关重要的方面。
这是第一项研究，旨在考察具有典型发育的（双语-TD）和患有SLI的（双语-SLI）早期学龄威尔士-英语双语儿童在针对威尔士语动词和名词形态的产出任务中的表现。我们针对威尔士语形态句法中可能对有语言障碍或有语言障碍风险的说威尔士语儿童来说较为薄弱的领域，如时态标记和复数形式的构成，并评估了它们的诊断潜力。
28名以威尔士语为主的双语儿童参与了该研究：10名双语-SLI儿童和18名双语-TD儿童。他们接受了三项引出任务，这些任务针对威尔士语中动词（复合过去时和综合过去时）和名词（复数）形态的产出。
在所有三项任务中，双语-SLI儿童的表现均不如他们的双语-TD同龄人。在引出产出任务中，他们产出的未变形动词更多，并且被促使产出综合过去时（过去时的一种拼接、低频形式）的可能性更小。在复数名词的情况下，他们过度规则化的情况也更少，而且当他们这样做时，他们选择高频后缀。
通过关注威尔士语特有的形态句法发展方面，我们增加了对说威尔士语的双语-SLI和双语-TD儿童如何习得动词和名词形态的现有认识。目前的结果表明，说威尔士语的双语-SLI儿童存在生成问题，他们受到低频结构的不利影响，并且在动词和名词拼接形态的情况下未能过度规则化。从临床角度来看，通过提示任务针对综合过去时形式可能是一种有前景的评估和干预工具，未来的研究可以进一步探索。
