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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. 331–354

Cross-linguistic influence meets language impairment

Determiners and object clitics in Russian-Greek bilingual children with typical development and with Specific Language Impairment

| University of Cambridge
| Aristotle University
| University of Cologne
Our study investigates the use of articles and object clitics in the L2-Greek of child speakers of Russian with and without Specific Language Impairment. Effects of language impairment were examined in the narratives of children whose languages differ in the expression of definiteness: Russian lacks articles and allows null objects with specific reference, while Greek requires object clitics in the same context and has definite and indefinite articles. Language impairment led to more article and clitic omission in obligatory contexts, as well as more substitution errors in clitics. The bilingual children with SLI lagged behind TD bilingual Russian-Greek peers in both grammatical knowledge of functional categories related to the D system in Greek and access to discourse information influencing definiteness.
Keywords: SLI, bilingualism, Russian-Greek, articles, clitics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The present study
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials and procedure
      • 3.2.1Baseline language ability tasks
        • 3.2.1.1Results of language screening measures
      • 3.2.2Narrative telling task
        • Procedure
        • 3.2.2.1Results
        • Errors in the use of clitics in the Maintenance function
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.52.15tsi
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