Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T05:13:06.022Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Minimalism and bilingualism: How and why bilingualism could benefit children with SLI*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2011

THOMAS ROEPER
THOMAS ROEPER*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts
*
Address for Correspondence Thomas Roeper, Linguistics Department, South College, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003roeper@linguist.umass.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We begin with the hypothesis that all people are “bilingual” because every language contains ingredients from several grammars, just as English exhibits both an Anglo-Saxon and a Latinate vocabulary system. We argue that the dominant grammar is defined by productivity and recursion in particular. Although current evidence is sparse, in principle, for a child who shows Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in a bilingual environment, richer modules in one grammar may help trigger more obscure modules in another language. Thus, if one language has a rich case system, it may help a child see an impoverished case system in another grammar. Examples from prepositional systems, wh-movement, recursive possessives and others are discussed. In general, a second language can be beneficial to the SLI child in the acquisition of both languages. Minimalism offers a level of abstraction where these cross-language connections can most naturally be stated.

Keywords

recursionmultiple grammarsMinimalismwh-questions
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Special Issue 1: Bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment , January 2012 , pp. 88 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the participants of the Bilingualism and SLI conference in Jerusalem, and Sharon Armon-Lotem in particular, and the anonymous reviewers for various helpful comments.

References

Abdul-Karim, L. (2000). Complex wh-questions and Universal Grammar: New evidence from the acquisition of negative barriers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst.Google Scholar
Abdul-Karim, L., Ramos, E., Roeper, T., & Seymour, H. (2001). Language disorders as a window on Universal Grammar: An abstract theory of Agreement for IP, DP and V-PP. Brain and Language, 77 (3), 378–397.Google Scholar
Armon-Lotem, S., Gordischevsky, G., & Walters, J. (2009). The use of prepositions by bilingual SLI children: The relative contribution of representation and processing. In Costa, João, Castro, Ana & Lobo, Maria (eds.), Language acquisition and development, pp. 1–13. Newcastle on Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Armstrong, T. (2001) Unpublished research report, University of Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Bentzen, K., Garbacz, P., Heycock, C., & Hrafnbjargarson, G. H. (2009). On variation in Faroese verb placement. Nordlyd, Tromsø Working Papers in Linguistics, 36 (2).Google Scholar
Borschev, V., Paducheva, E., Partee, B. H., Testelets, Y., & Yanovich, I. (2008). Russian genitives, non-referentiality, and the property-type hypothesis. In Antonenko, A. et al. (eds.), Formal approaches to Slavic linguistics: The Stony Brook Meeting 2007 (FASL 16). Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publishers.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (2005). Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry, 36, 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N., Fitch, W. T., & Hauser, M. D. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298, 1569–1579.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N., & Halle, (1968). The sound pattern of English. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H. (1988). Normale und gestörte Kindersprache, Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Emonds, J. (1976). A transformational approach to English syntax: Root, structure-preserving, and local transformations. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Frank, R. (2006). Phase theory and Tree Adjoining Grammar. Lingua 116, 145–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedmand, N., Belletti, A., & Rizzi, L. (2009). Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua, 119, 67–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gopnik, M. (1990). Feature-blindness: A case study. Language Acquisition, 1–2, 139–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, L., & Roeper, T. (2008). Nodes and features: How the Multiple Grammar perspective predicts stable and unstable dialects. In Pica, Pierre & Craenenburg, Jeoreon (eds.), Node labels and features: Stable and unstable dialects and variation in acquisition, pp. 1–26. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hirawa, K. (2005). Dimensions of symmetry in syntax: Agreement and clausal architecture. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Hollebrandse, B., & Roeper, T. (1997). The concept of DO-insertion and the theory of INLF in acquisition. In Koster, C. & Wijnen, F. (eds.), Proceedings of GALA, pp. 261–273. Groningen: Centre for Language and Cognition.Google Scholar
Hornstein, N. (2009). Logic as grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
van Hout, A., Kamiya, M., & Roeper, T. (to appear) Connecting English and Japanese nominalizations: Covert movement, reconstruction and Edge phenomena. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.Google Scholar
Hyams, N., Johnson, K., & Schaeffer, J. (1993). The acquisition of the verb particle construction. Paper presented at the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA II), University of Durham, UK, September.Google Scholar
Keyser, S. J., & Roeper, T. (1992). Re: The Abstract Clitic Hypothesis. Linguistic Inquiry, 23, 89–125.Google Scholar
Kremers, J. (2000). Genitives: A recursive linearization approach. Unpublished manuscript, University of Nijmegen.Google Scholar
Kroch, A., & Taylor, A. (1997). Verb movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect variation and language contact. In van Kemenade, A. & Vincent, N. (eds.), Parameters of morphosyntactic change, pp. 297–335. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leonard, J., Leonard, L., Sabbadini, L., & Volterra, V. (1988). Some influences on the grammar of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 39–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lightfoot, D. (1989) The child's trigger experience: Degree-0 learnability (target article). Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 12 (2), 321–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Limbach, M., & Adone, D. (2010). Language acquisition of recursive possessives in English. In Franrich, K., Iserman, K. & Keil, L. (eds.), Proceedings of BUCLD, pp. 281–290. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The Childes Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, 3rd edn. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
McDaniel, D. (1990). Partial and multiple wh-movement. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 7 (4), 565–604.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2010). The interface between bilingual development and specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31, 227–252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearson, B. (2008). Raising a bilingual child. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Perez, A. M., Pirvulescu, I., & Roberge, Y. (2008). Null objects in child language: Syntax and the lexicon. Lingua, 118 (3), 370–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perez, A. M., & Roeper, T. (2011). Simplicity and complexity in child language and its explanation. Infancia y Aprendizaje, 3 (43), 263–281.Google Scholar
Rice, M., & Wexler, K. (1996). Toward tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English-speaking children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 39, 1239–1257.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rizzi, L. (1997). The fine structure of the left periphery. In Haegeman, L.. (ed.), Elements of grammar. A handbook in generative syntax, pp. 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roeper, T. (1972). Approaches to language acquisition with data. German children. Unpublished dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Roeper, T. (1981). The role of universals in the acquisition of gerunds. In Gleitman, L. & Wanner, E. (eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art, 267–287. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Roeper, T., & Weissenborn, J. (1990) How to make parameters work. In Frazier, L. & de Villiers, J. (eds.), Language processing and language acquisition, 147–163. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roeper, T. (1999). Universal Bilingualism. Language and Cognition, 2 (3), 169–186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roeper, T., Ramos, E., Seymour, H., & Abdul-Karim, L. (2001) Language disorders as a window on a universal grammar: An abstract theory of agreement for IP, DP, and V-PP. Brain and Language, 77 (3), 378–397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roeper, T. (2003) Multiple Grammars, feature-attraction, pied-piping, and the question: Is AGR inside TP? in Müller, N. (ed.), (In)Vulnerable domains in multilingualism, pp. 335–360. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roeper, T., & Snyder, W. (2004). Learnability and recursion across categories. In Brugos, A., Micciulla, L. & Smith, C. (eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Boston University Conference on Language Development, 543–552. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Roeper, T. (2007a). The maximization of falsifiability: How to acquire the logic of implicatures from the illogic experience. In Yukio Otsu (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics (), pp. 1–11. Tokyo.Google Scholar
Roeper, T. (2007b). The prism of grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roeper, T. (2009). The minimalist microscope: How and where interface principles guide acquisition. In Chandlee, J. et al. (eds.), BUCLD 33: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 24–48. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Roeper, T. (2010). Recursion: What is innate, why it needs a trigger, where it belongs in cross-linguistic work and how it fits into the mind. In França, A. & Maia, M. (eds.), Proceedings of the First Psycholinguistics Congress of Rio de Janeiro, pp. 42–65. Rio de Janeiro: CNPQ.Google Scholar
Roeper, T. (2011). The acquisition of recursion: How formalism articulates the child's path. Biolingiustics, 5 (1–2), 57–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schulz, P. (2010). Who answered what to whom? On children's understanding of exhaustive questions. Paper presented at the final conference of COST Action A33, London.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (ed.). (1985). The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition: The data, vol. 1, 3–24. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Snyder, W. (2001). On the nature of syntactic variation: Evidence from complex predicates and complex word-formation. Language, 77, 324–342.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snyder, W. (2007). Child language: The parametric approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snyder, W., & Roeper, T. (2004). Learnability and recursion across categories. In A. Brugos, L. Micciulla & C. Smith (eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 543–552. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Spinner, P., & Grinstead, J. (2006). Subjects, topicalizations and Wh- questions in child German and southern Romance. In Toribio, Jacqueline A. & Sagarra, N. (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, pp. 241–251. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, I. M., & Mastropavlou, M. (2007). Feature interpretability in L2 acquisition and SLI: Greek clitics and determiners. In Goodluck, H., Liceras, J. & Zobl, H. (eds.), The role of formal features in second language acquisition, pp. 143–183. New York: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
de Villiers, J., & Roeper, T. (2011). The acquisition path of wh-movement. In Roeper, T. & de Villiers, J. (eds.), Handbook of generative approaches to language acquisition, pp. 187–246. Berlin: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Westergaard, M. (2009). Word order in Old and Middle English: The role of information structure and first language acquisition. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, E. (1981). X-bar theory and acquisition. In Tavakolian, S. (ed.), Language acquisition and linguistic theory, 1–19. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Yang, C. (2002). Knowledge and learning in natural language. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Yip, V., & Matthews, S. (2007). The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar