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Tense omission errors are considered to be clinical identifiers of speech language impairment (SLI). However, children who do not use tense in their first language may show prolonged acquisition for learning English tense morphology. Given the need for information regarding the profiles of typically developing Chinese-English (C-E) bilinguals, performance on three grammatical measures was compared in first grade children from Chinese (14) and Other linguistic backgrounds (38) including Spanish, Haitian Creole, and West Indian English. All participants were typically developing based on parent / teacher reports. We compared the number of tense omission errors (TOE) produced on a regular past tense elicitation task, the scaled score of the CELF-4 Sentence Recall (SR) subtest, and the number of different conjugated verbs (NDCV) produced during a narrative retell task. A multifactorial ANOVA revealed significantly lower scaled scores on the SR task, and a higher number of TOE on the elicited production task. No difference was obtained for the NDCV. The interpretation of English grammatical measures need to be modified when assessing Chinese-English bilinguals. Error patterns specific to C-E bilinguals will be discussed. |
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