Indicators of SLI in bilingual
children: inflections and
prepositions
Sharon Armon-Lotem & Joel Walters
The Bilingual SLI Project
Bar-Ilan University, Israel
SLRF 2008, October 17-19, Hawaii
1
Acknowledgements
This work has been done in collaboration with:
Gabi Danon, Jonathan Fine, Elinor Saiegh-Haddad,
Bar-Ilan University
Galit Adam, The Open University
With the help of:
Anat Blass, Michal Giladi, Efrat Harel, Audrey Levant,
Ruti Litt, Lyle Lustinger, Sharon Porat, Efrat Shimon
This research was supported by:
THE ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (grant 938/03)
2
Aim
The present study compares the use of
verb inflections and prepositions in bilingual
English-Hebrew children with Specific
Language Impairment (SLI), monolingual
Hebrew speaking children with SLI and
typically developing English-Hebrew
bilingual children in order to identify clinical
markers for SLI in bilingual children.
3
Inflections
English: All English-Hebrew bilinguals are
expected to use Root Infinitives (RI), e.g.,
David play ball.
 Hebrew: All English-Hebrew bilinguals
might find 1st and 2nd person morphology
challenging due to the absence of such
features in their L1. Children with SLI are
more likely to display omission, while TD
bilinguals are more likely to substitute.

4
Prepositions




Better performance with Free prepositions
(introducing temporal or locative PPs, e.g., at
school), since they contribute to the meaning
of the sentence.
Weaker performance for Obligatory prepositions
(e.g., laugh at) since they are selected by the
verb and mostly serve a grammatical function,
as the theta-role of the verb is assigned to the
following NP.
All bilingual children are expected to show code
interference (CI) in contrasting environments.
SLI children may show omissions (Roeper
2000).
5
Subjects

16 children, ages 5-7, with Specific Language
Impairment (SLI):
– 8 bilingual children (7 girls, 1 boy) – all scored lower
than -1 SD below norm on the CELF preschool for
English and lower than -1.5 SD below norm on the
Goralnik for Hebrew.
– 8 monolingual children (3 girls, 5 boys) from the same
preschools - all scored lower than -1.5 SD below the
norm on the Goralnik for Hebrew.
All impaired children matched the exclusionary
criteria for SLI.
 11 typically developing (TD) bilingual children (8
girls, 3 boys), ages 5-7s - all scored within the
norm in both languages
6
Elicited Imitation Task
Inflections: 26 sentences in English (8 past tense,
8 3rd person, 10 bare/uninflected) and 40 in
Hebrew (8 for each of 5 past tense inflections).
 Prepositions: 24 simple sentences in each
language, 10 with FREE prepositions, 14 with
OBLIGATORY prepositions.
 Sentence length

– English: 5-8 words/morphemes (mean 6.5)
– Hebrew: 4-7 words (mean 5.6), 5-10 morphemes (mean
7.5), and word/morpheme average is 6.5
7
Quantitative Analysis:
Percentage of Success
8
Full repetition of target sentence

Total correct sentences
*
100%
80%
*
*

*
60%

40%
20%
0%
English
Hebrew
TD
Bi LI
Mono LI
Significantly more full
target responses among
TD than SLI
No significant difference
between bilingual SLI
and monolingual SLI.
The significant
difference between
English and Hebrew is
due to a significant
difference in sentences
targeting inflections,
with Hebrew being
weaker.
9
Focus on target items – Ratio of
correct target responses

Correct target items
100%
92%
*
96%
*
95%
89% 88%
84%
91%
96%
*
86% 84%
80%

60%
40%
20%
0%
English
Hebrew
English
Prepositions
Hebrew
Inflections
TD
Bi LI
Mono LI

Prepositions:
Significant difference
between TD and SLI
in both languages.
Inflections:
Significant difference
between TD and SLI
only in Hebrew.
No quantitative
difference was found
between Bilingual
SLIs and Monolingual
SLIs.
10
Qualitative Analysis:
Type of Errors
11
Verb inflections:
Omissions and substitutions
Type of error in raw numbers [N=total number of items]
Hebrew
English
60
20
50
15
6
40
11
16
30
10
45
20
5
0
7
7
1
TD [N=264]
10
27
0
9
0
LI [N=192]
TD [N=440]
Bi LI [N=320]
Mono LI [N=320]
Substitution - Wrong Inflection
Omission - No inflectional suffix
12
Inflection Errors - Summary
Bilingual children with SLI have more errors and
a wider variety of errors when compared with
TD bilinguals.
 English: Both SLI and TD use RIs, but only the
SLI use the wrong tense.
 Hebrew:

– Both SLI and TD substitute wrong inflections, but only
SLI omit inflections. Bilingual children with SLI omit
more than monolingual children with SLI.
– TD score significantly better than SLI with a
significant difference in the percentage of wrong
inflections in all 5 inflection categories in Hebrew.
13
Errors by Preposition Type

Ratio of errors by preposition type
50%
40%
*
*
30%
*
20%
10%

0%
Hebrew English
Hebrew English
Hebrew
TD
Bi LI
Mono LI
O-prep
F-prep
Bilingual Children with
SLI have significantly
more errors in English
in the use of
Obligatory
prepositions than TD
bilinguals, with no
difference in Hebrew.
Monolingual children
with SLI have more
errors in Hebrew in
the use of Obligatory
prepositions than
Bilingual Children with
SLI
14
Type of Errors – by Groups

Frequency of errors by type of error
20
*
*
15
10
*
5

0
CI om
non ci om
TD
Bi LI
CI-sub
Mono LI
no ci sub
Bilingual Children with
SLI have significantly
more errors which are
not due to Code
Interference (both
substitutions and
omissions TD=0) than
TD children.
Monolinguals with SLI
have significantly
more omissions than
Bilingual Children with
SLI
15
Type of Errors by Preposition Type
Frequency of errors by type of error per preposition
type
*
*
20
15
10
5
0
OFOFOFOFOFprep prep prep prep prep prep prep prep prep prep
Hebrew
English
Hebrew
TD
ci-sub
English
Bi LI
sub
ci-om
Hebrew
Mono LI
om
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Preposition Errors - Summary





More errors for OBLIGATORY than FREE
prepositions;
Non-CI omissions found ONLY for SLI children
TD have more CI-substitutions, while SLI have
more non-CI substitutions.
Hebrew: a significant difference between TD and
Bi-SLI for non-CI omission of obligatory
prepositions. Mono-SLI have significantly more
omissions of both types of prepositions
English: a significant difference between TD and
Bi-SLI in the use of obligatory prepositions, due
to a significant difference in the use of non-CI
substitutions
17
Major Findings
Substitutions and omissions due to code
interference are typical for TD bilingual children.
 Omissions of inflections in Hebrew are unique to
children with SLI and are more frequent in
bilingual children with SLI
 Non-CI preposition substitution errors are more
prevalent among children with SLI due to a
significant difference in their performance with
OBLIGATORY-preps
 Non-CI omission errors are unique to children
with SLI, both bilingual and monolingual

18
Discussion
19
Prepositions: Non-CI Substitutions
TD children: use synonyms, so substitutions are
semantically based and can be attributed to
bilingual processing.
 Children with SLI:

– Free prepositions - The semantics of the adverbial
helps the child choose the correct preposition, and
thus there are fewer errors.
– Obligatory prepositions - A preposition is needed
(Botwinik-Rotem 2004), but due to competing
processing demands they cannot figure out which
preposition it is. In the absence of a semantic basis
for the choice, they pick up any preposition, with
preference for in and on, which are semanticaly less
restricted.
20
Preposition: Omissions
Some omission errors can be explained by
code interference
 The restriction of omission errors which
cannot be explained by code interference
to the SLI population, and the
monolingual omission errors stem from an
impairment in the child’s linguistic
representation.

21
Inflections
Omissions of inflections in English are in places
where the inflection does not add to the meaning of
the sentence.
 Inflections in Hebrew carry the semantics of person
and tense. Monolingual children with SLI omit these
inflections infrequently.
 In the bilingual context, when L1 has no person
features, children with SLI corelate these suffixes
with tense only, which is also encoded in Hebrew by
the interdigited vowel pattern, making the suffix
semantically redundant. In this case, bilingualism
has an additive value.

22
Conclusion
Non-CI omissions and substitutions
emerge from a difficulty in encoding
syntactic relations in the absence of
semantic motivation.
 Omissions - an impairment in the child’s
linguistic representation.
 Substitutions - competing processing
demands

23
Indicators of SLI in bilingual children
Non-CI omission errors are unique to SLI
children and can be indicative of SLI.
 Non-CI substitution errors in the use of
obligatory prepositions and in past tense verb
forms in Hebrew are more prevalent among SLI
children, and can serve as a secondary indicator
for SLI.
 Omission of inflections in English, and code
switching can hardly serve as a indicators for SLI
(only as a quantitative measure).

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Thank you
‫תודה‬
Mahalo
25
The additive effect of bilingualism
If there is an additive effect of bilingualism
and SLI, children with SLI are expected to
err more than TD bilinguals and more than
monolingual children with SLI.
 If there is no such effect, bilingual children
with SLI should err more than TD children
but show no difference from monolingual
children with SLI.

26