Working Groups
Group Leaders: Theo Marinis & Petra Schultz
The most established linguistic indicators of SLI are found
in syntax (sentence formation) and morphology (inflection
of words). They are already being studied widely in bilingual
children with SLI. Therefore, they serve as a starting point for this
Action. WG1 will aim to identify structures which are less
sensitive to crosslinguistic differences, and are vulnerable
in monolingual and bilingual children with SLI, but not
in typically developing bilingual children. In doing so,
WG1 attempts to isolate the characteristics of bilingualism
and language impairment.
Group Leaders: Joel Walters & Natalia Gagarina
Telling a story, even supported by pictures, is difficult
for children with SLI. WG2 will evaluate the ability of
different tasks to elicit narratives and tap specifically
bilingual properties. Examples of such tasks are: narratives
in response to familiar and unfamiliar picture books, a
bilingual retelling task, narratives without the benefit
of picture stimuli, and an interactive task based on a controlled
improvisation procedure. These tasks also allow for the
assessment of language dominance and code-switching patterns.
Group Leaders: Shula Chiat & Ewa Haman
There
are 'rapid screening tools' for phonological processing as well as lexical processing. WG3 will estimate their potential
for identifying SLI in bilinguals. Properties will be evaluated
of non-word repetition and naming tasks in order to decide whether
they are relevant for identifying SLI in bilingual populations
with various language pairs. WG3 will also review bilingual
lexical data in order to develop new bilingual measures
of dominance and diversity.
Group Leaders: Anne Baker & Kristine Jensen de
Lopez Executive functions such as attention, inhibition, and
control provide a promising direction for disentangling
bilingualism and SLI. It is often assumed that executive
functions are deficient in language-impaired children. Since
tests for executive functioning are not necessarily language-dependent,
they may provide a way of identifying indices of SLI without
addressing language itself. WG4 will investigate which of
these tasks are most appropriate for bilingual children
with SLI and what are the best ways to adapt the tasks to
the bilingual contexts.
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