Wh-constructions in German specific language impairment

The research proposed here aims at investigating the acquisition of wh-movement constructions (wh-questions, relative clauses) in children with specific language impairment (SLI) of elementary school age (age range about 6- 10) who are acquiring German as their first language. The research will be carried out in close international cooperation, collaboration and coordination with the participants of the COST Action A33 `Cross-linguistically robust stages of children`s linguistic performance with applications to the diagnosis of specific language impairment` (coordinator: Ulrich Sauerland, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Berlin; website URL: http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/cost), funded by the European Union. The cooperation in the COST Action aims at unifying the research on SLI by making the selection criteria for research subjects comparable, by establishing homogeneity of testing methods and by a division of labour of research in different languages in order to guarantee cross-linguistic comparability of results. This makes it possible to draw conclusions about cross-linguistically robust characteristics of impaired language acquisition. Specific language impairment (SLI) is a disorder of language acquisition in the absence of any other obvious cognitive deficit, which affects about 7% of children (Leonard 1998). German-speaking children with (grammatical) SLI are predicted to show deficits in the acquisition, comprehension, and production of wh-movement constructions (wh-questions, relative clauses) since these constructions involve all the core properties of syntax and morphosyntax: agreement morphology, case morphology, displacement of the finite verb in main clauses (verb second phenomenon), movement of a phrase from its base position to the highest functional specifier in the clause (wh-movement), and an antecedent-gap relation between the moved phrase and its base position. Evidence for these expectations comes from findings from previous research on other languages. Although the number of studies on children with specific language impairment has increased significantly in the last years, we are still faced with only a very limited number of studies on the acquisition (comprehension and production) of wh-movement constructions in German-speaking children with SLI. Existing studies on matrix wh- question constructions in German children with SLI mainly focus on their semantics or on the acquisition of verb second (V2). For the acquisition of relative clauses in German-speaking SLI children, almost no research is available so far. Our research aims at filling this gap. Specifically, we will investigate the production and comprehension of subject and object wh-questions (both wer `who` and welche(r,s) `which` questions), medial responses in long-distance wh-extraction, and subject and object relative clauses in SLI children and typically developing children of elementary school age, always taking into consideration the effects of morphosyntactic case and agreement marking.

The research project has been part of a coordinated research network on the cross-linguistic diagnostics of SLI (specific language impairment) in the framework of the COST Action A33, working group 3. URL: http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/828.htmlThe focus of the project is on the (un)impaired acquisition of question constructions and relative clauses by monolingual German speaking children aged 5 to 10 years and children with specific language impairment (SLI) between 5;2 and 11;3 years of age who are acquiring German. In syntax, wh-questions and relative clauses are treated as two instances of a specific movement process called wh-movement.It was a surprising result at the beginning that comprehension & production tasks revealed a persisting difficulty with object-related relative clauses in comparison to subject-related ones even for unimpaired children. The analogous pattern reappeared for wh-question clauses. This result is important for calibrating screening tests and should prevent practitioners from misattributing acquisition difficulties to typically developing children.As expected, the performance of children with SLI differs significantly from typically developing children of the same age age-matched controls, both in the production and comprehension of relative clauses as well as in the comprehension of wh-questions of different types.A detailed qualitative analysis revealed that typically developing children and children with specific language impairment differ from one another and from adults with respect to the non- target constructions they produce in relative clause elicitation.The successfully conducted research contributes to closing a gap in language acquisition research on German by systematically investigating the acquisition of wh-movement constructions in typically developing German-speaking children (TD) as well as German- speaking children with SLI. It allows integrating German into the general cross-linguistic picture of wh-movement in SLI.A better understanding of the specifics of the developmental syndrome of specific language impairment (SLI) is of relevance not only for psycholinguistics but also for other disciplines in cognitive science and for areas of application, e.g. developmental psychology, language therapy, and the development of screening methods for atypical development for school children.