English past tense use as a clinical marker in older bilingual children with language impairment

Abstract

This study compared the use of English past tense in a group of Spanish–English bilingual children with language impairment (BLI) to younger groups of bilinguals with typical and atypical language development reported in an earlier study. Ten children with BLI enrolled in 3rd–6th grade participated. Children supplied 12 regular, 12 irregular, and 12 novel past tense verbs on an elicitation task. The results demonstrated that despite 2.5 years of school exposure, older children with BLI still lagged in the production of regular and novel past tense verbs when compared to the younger typically developing (TD) controls. Although the rates of productive errors on irregular verbs increased, the older students nonetheless failed to achieve rates of over-regularization comparable to the younger TD group. These data extend earlier findings regarding the exceptional challenge of past tense use, particularly with respect to finite verb morphology in certain children with BLI. These challenges, combined with similarities between monolingual and bilingual impairment, are largely compatible with a linguistic deficit account.

Keywords:

• bilingual language impairment
• English past tense morphology
• multilingualism
• child language assessment

Acknowledgements

The current work was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders / National Institutes of Health, NIH Grant 5R03DC 07018-02 titled “Morphology in typical and atypical bilingual development” awarded to the first author. We are grateful to Richard G. Schwartz for his comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. We thank the children and families who served as participants.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.