Tense and temporality: a comparison between children learning a second language and children with SLI

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Child Language Acquisition

Background:

• The optional infinitive phenomenon is a key feature in early child language development.
• Understanding cross-learner similarities in morphosyntax is crucial for linguistic theory and clinical practice.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the presence and extent of optional infinitive phenomena in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and second language (L2) learners.
• To compare the morphosyntactic development of these two distinct learner groups.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of spontaneous speech production data from French-speaking children with SLI, English-speaking L2 learners of French, and monolingual French controls.
• Examination of tense morphology, temporal adverbials, agreement morphology, and finiteness-related distributional patterns.

Main Results:

• Significant similarities were observed in the morphosyntax of children with SLI and L2 learners.
• Both groups exhibited optional infinitive effects in their language production.
• Specific differences in morphosyntactic use were also noted between the groups.

Conclusions:

• The optional infinitive phenomenon may stem from mechanisms applicable beyond early childhood, including later second language acquisition.
• Tense-marking difficulties alone may be insufficient as a clinical marker for SLI in multilingual settings, necessitating more specific diagnostic tools.