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Part of
Cross-linguistic Influence in Bilingualism: In honor of Aafke Hulk
Edited by Elma Blom, Leonie Cornips and Jeannette Schaeffer
[Studies in Bilingualism 52] 2017
► pp. 259–278

Past tense production in children with SLI and bilingual children

The influence of vocabulary and non-word repetition

| University of Amsterdam
| University of Amsterdam

We investigated whether (1) 7–9-year-old children with SLI, bilingual children (BIL) and monolingual (TD) children differed on Dutch past tense production of real and pseudo-verbs and (2) whether non-word repetition (NWR), receptive vocabulary, and group status contributed to past tense production. Past tense patterned as SLI < BIL < TD, for NWR as SLI < BIL = TD and for vocabulary SLI = BIL < TD. Vocabulary and SLI group status were significant predictors of real-verb past tense inflection. SLI and bilingual group status were predictors of pseudo-verb past tense inflection. These findings confirm the association between vocabulary and past tense and the difficulty that children with SLI and bilingual children have with both skills.

Keywords: bilingualism, language development, language impairment, past tense, specific language impairment
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • Past tense in children with SLI and bilingual children
    • Relation between phonology and past tense
    • Relation between vocabulary and past tense
    • Overview of present study
  • Methods
    • Participants
    • Tasks
    • Past tense: Stimuli
    • Past tense: Task
    • Receptive vocabulary
    • Non-word repetition
    • Procedure
    • Data analysis
  • Results
    • Correlations and regression analysis
  • Discussion
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.52.12ris
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