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Grammatical morphology is a core deficit in children with Language Impairment (LI), but also often a locus of difficulty for bilingual children, complicating the diagnosis of LI in bilingual contexts. In contrast to previous research that mainly focused on tense and agreement markings on verbs, the present study investigated if and how plural and past participle formation could discriminate between monolingual and bilingual children with and without LI. Children were tested at two waves with a word formation task that elicited plural nouns and past participles. Results from the plural formation task showed overlapping language profiles of children with LI and bilingual children, both in terms of accuracy, error types as well as development over time. Past participle formation did not produce overlap between children with LI and bilingual children. Error analyses even showed that frequent omission of participial affixes may be indicative of LI, irrespective of linguistic background. Past participle inflection may therefore contribute to a reliable diagnosis of LI in monolingual and bilingual learning contexts. This project was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. |
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