Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Special circumstances
What are special circumstances?
1. Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition
Who is bilingual?
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A bilingual knows two languages
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A bilingual speaks two languages
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A bilingual is native or near-native in two languages
How does one become bilingual?
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Immigrants
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Indigenous minorities
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Bidialectal populations
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Privileged populations (e.g. Anglophones in Canadian French immersion programs,
Israelis who have returned from extended stays in North America)
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By parental choice
Is it a homogeneous group?
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Age of acquisition
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Birth order and family size
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Order of L1/L2 acquisition (simultaneous/ sequential)
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Acquisition context (e.g. one parent for each language/L1 at home and L2 at school).
Are these facts related? Why? How?
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Age – most L2 learners are older than L1 learners
Degree of success attained by the learner
Fossilization – L2 learners often get stuck at a point short of native-like grammar
Related issues
 Simultaneous vs. sequential bilingualism
 Critical period
 Transfer vs. access
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Special circumstances
How are bilinguals different from monolinguals?
Simultaneous bilingual (age 3;7(
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Do you want to read the Jungle Book?
I can see Mowgli going.
what can you see here?
Bagheera take him to the animals.
really? who are these?
the wolfim.
and here?
I can see Baloo and the Mowgli.
what are they doing?
they throwing nuts.
they throwing nuts.
and now?
Mowgli going quickly and Bagheera’s sleeping.
oh.
now Baloo want to eat the monkeys.
and now?
here Mowgli with Shere Khan.
what happened to Mowgli?
and he is doing fire to Shere Khan.
Shere Khan is scared.
why?
he is afraid of Mowgli.
yeah, from the esh.
L1 Hebrew, L2 English (age 5;1, LoE 6 mos)
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INV: do you want to tell me what happened yesterday at school?
GAL: yeh.
INV: what happened?
GAL: we are do a project.
INV: you did a project, yes.
GAL: and we we play with play-doe in Miss Pam.
INV: oh, you played with play-doe?
GAL: yes.
GAL: and Miss Lilach come back.
INV: ah, Miss Lilach came back?
GAL: yeh.
GAL: and ...
INV: did she play with you?
GAL: no.
INV: did she tell you a story?
GAL: no.
INV: what did she do?
GAL: they, they show a picture of his baby and give us stickers.
com: <1,2> she <7> her
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Special circumstances
L1 Russian, L2 Hebrew (Age 4;7)
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Lital
Int 1
Lital
Int 1
Lital
Int 1
Lital
Int 1
Lital
Int 1
Lital
Int 1
Lital
Int 1
Lital
Ani roca she taasi li meshulash.
Bevakasha.
Aval gam et ha-ceva shelo taasi.
Kaxa?
Ve gam po ve gam po. Ribua. Kaze davar. ….. Kmo xalon ze.
Naxon.
Az tavi li ani ecayer lax mashu.
Ma at taasi?
Ani ose im ze ceva kaxol i ceva yarok.
Boi ani aazor lax.
Od lo asitnu et ha-ribua.
Az ma ze? ze ribua?
Aval ze ktana ribua.
Az eze at roca?
Gdola gdola
2. Specific Language Impairment
Language impairment with no hearing loss (no history of otitis media), no emotional and
behavioral problems, no below average non-verbal IQ(>=85), no neurological problems,
and no oral or facial defects (Tallal & Stark 1981). A developmental language disorder
characterized by Gleason (2001, p. 504) as involving ‘delayed or deviant language
development in a child who exhibits no cognitive, neurological or social impairment’
(Radford 2006).
Sample narrative (MoSLI)
‫אמא הכינה לילדים שלה אוכל ואכלו ואכלו‬
. ‫אח"כ בא לו זבוב‬
‫אח"כ הוא כעס‬
‫אח"כ שמו לה בייגלה בזנב‬
‫אח"כ שמו לה בשערות משהו חם‬
. ‫אח"כ ניקו אותה וזהו‬
Mom prepared food for her children and pro ate.pl and pro ate.pl
Then, came a fly.
Then, he was angry
Then, pro put.pl a pretzel on her tail.
Then, pro put.pl something hot in her hair
Then, pro cleaned.pl her and that’s it
Frequency of SLI
Genetic basis of SLI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnlGvcDIiHw
Neurological basis of SLI
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Special circumstances
Overall characteristics of SLI - Expressive vs. receptive deficit
SLI children typically show some (or all) of the following types of impairment:
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Phonological (e.g. problems with consonant clusters and syllable-final
consonants)
Lexical (delayed acquisition of words – e.g. first word appears around 23 months
in SLI children, but around 11 months in TD children; SLI children also have
word-finding problems)
Semantic (problems in determining the linguistic meaning of words, phrases and
sentences, and understanding the meaning of metaphors)
Grammatical (e.g. problems with affixes/inflections and articles/particles,
complex syntax)
Pragmatic (e.g. problems in the use of language in appropriate contexts)
Delay versus Deviance
Delay: Protracted acquisition of language, following typical developmental pattern.
Deviance: Different developmental sequences and processes.
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Delay
Plateau
Profile differences
Abnormal frequency of errors
Qualitative difference
3. Bilingual SLI
Reading: Paradis, J. 1999. What do specifically-language impaired and second language
children have in common. Child Language Bulletin, 19, 4-6.
Paradis (1999) and Crago & Paradis (2000)
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L1 and L2 French-speaking SLI children
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A range of measures related to the ‘optional infinitive’ phenomenon
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“Significant similarities” between SLI and L2 learners,:
o Tense marking
o Avoidance of object clitics
o Verb diversity
o Use of general purpose verbs (e.g. do, make).
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Special circumstances
 tense-marking may not be an effective clinical indicator of SLI for second language
learners.
Paradis, Crago, Genesee, and Rice. 2003
 SLI may not be an impediment to learning two languages, at least in the domain of
grammatical morphology.
Simonsen (2002)
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6 years old Swedish- Finish BL
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Naming task (Renfrew Word Finding Vocabulary test)
Scores
Total naming time
SLI
Controls
BL
25.9
28.6
ML
28.5
36.3
SLI
Controls
BL
06:26
06:02
ML
04:11
04:53
 MSLI- phonological naming problems more often than the other groups (can
explain their fast naming speed)
 Substitution of phonemes: MSLI > BSLI
 The bilingual children have difficulty in finding words
 BLC is slow in naming, does not find the target word as accurately as the MLC,
but uses strategies that are pragmatically efficient: describes, chooses a Finnish word,
or uses gestures.
4. Other language impairments
Language use in individuals with PDD
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Impairments in communication and social interaction, with restricted interests and
activities (APA 1994).
Repetitive behavior, non linguistic and linguistic (echolalia)
A significant language delay. Pragmatic difficulties seem to be almost universal in
autism and might be related to the general problem in social interaction, while
formal grammatical (including syntactic and morphological) difficulties seem to
characterize a subset of children with autism (Tager-Flusberg, to appear).
Linguistic characteristics: echolalia, pronoun reversal, misuse of the definite
article, assignment of literal meaning.
Pragmatic skills may be correlated with the so-called “Theory of Mind” – the
ability to attribute mental states to self and to others, known to be impaired in
autism (Frith, 1989; Baron-Cohen, 1995).
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Special circumstances
Language use in individuals with Williams syndrome
What is it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VL5kMSgLIw
Williams syndrome – a rare neuro-developmental disorder caused by a microdeletion of
at least 16 genes on chromosome 7q11.23 which is characterized by:
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Sensitive hearing
Mild to moderate mental retardation and learning disabilities
Difficulties with problem solving
They are miserable at copying or remembering shapes, but great at faces.
Over friendly personality and show clear strength in social skills
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By the age of 3, their linguistic abilities are similar to those of Children with Down
Syndrome. Expressive language appropriate for mental age.
Highly preserved linguistic skills.
Adaptation of register
Unusual or anomalous word choice. Morphosyntactic rules and grammar seem to be
intact, but the organization of the lexicon and some semantic aspects of the
language are deviant
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The meal was a scrumptious buffet
He cried his eyeballs out
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My watch is always available for service
I’ll put the earrings in and you can buckle them
WS subjects performed almost at ceiling level on comprehension tests for passive,
negation and conditionals. Bellugi et al (1994):
A selective impairment in retrieving information from the lexicon while the
computational (rule-based) system of language appears to be unimpaired. (Clahsen
and Almazan (2000)
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