Specific language impairment in Turkish: Evidence from case morphology in Turkish–German successive bilinguals

Abstract

Language disorders, and Specific Language Impairment (SLI), have been extensively studied in a number of different, though thus far almost exclusively Indoeuropean, languages. For other languages such as Turkish, Vietnamese, or Arabic, however, findings on the outcome of SLI are rare. In this context, the growing number of migrant children in European countries with a variety of first languages can be seen as a challenge to linguistics and to language assessment: The lack of empirical findings on SLI in these languages brings up the question of how the impairment is manifested in bilingual children with a migrant background. In order for a language disorder to correctly be labelled SLI, it needs to be identified in both languages. This paper presents findings from a study examining the grammatical features of Turkish first language acquisition in Germany, while focusing on Turkish case morphology. For this purpose, it compares the data of three typically-developing children and two children with deviant language development. Moreover, it presents a first interpretation of the outcome of grammatical SLI in bilingual Turkish children and discusses suggestions for diagnostic assessment procedures.

Keywords:

• Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
• acquisition of Turkish
• bilingual language development
• Turkish–German bilinguals
• acquisition of case morphology

Notes

1. The spelling of the suffixes follows their common use in Turkish linguistics. Following the principle of vowel harmony, the vowel of the suffix is assimilated to the last vowel in the stem. -I represents all variants with the vowels <i>, <ı>, <u>, <ü>, whereas -E includes the vowels <a> and <e>. The consonants <d> and <t> are represented by -D.

2. Identifiers such as TD-Far are to be read as follows: TD = typically-developing child, SLI = child with SLI, followed by the first three letters of the first name and age.

3. ‘pisiklet’ for ‘bisiklet’.

4. ‘kıcak’ for ‘kızak’.

5. Initial results on deficits in verbal morphology in Turkish children with SLI are presented in Chilla and Babur (2010).

6. Early occurrences of genitive markings are reported in only three children.

7. TD vs SLI for ACC: χ² = 8.324, df = 1, significance p ≤ .004; for DAT: χ² = 4.310, df = 1, significance p <.038.

8. Note that these results are further confirmed by SLI-Fer's T-SALT results presented in Babur and Chilla (2008).

9. SLI-Fer's language production is characterized by severe phonological errors (see example 8).