Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with developmental language disorder and Dutch–Russian simultaneous bilinguals: Disentangling the profiles

Tribushinina, E., Mak, M., Dubinkina, E., & Mak, W. M. (2018). Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with developmental language disorder and Dutch–Russian simultaneous bilinguals: Disentangling the profiles. Applied Psycholinguistics, 39(5), 1033-1064. doi:10.1017/S0142716418000115.
Bilingual children with reduced exposure to one or both languages may have language profiles that are
apparently similar to those of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Children with
DLD receive enough input, but have difficulty using this input for acquisition due to processing deficits.
The present investigation aims to determine aspects of adjective production that are differentially
affected by reduced input (in bilingualism) and reduced intake (in DLD). Adjectives were elicited
from Dutch–Russian simultaneous bilinguals with limited exposure to Russian and Russian-speaking
monolinguals with andwithout DLD.Anantonymelicitation taskwas used to assess the size of adjective
vocabularies, and a degree task was employed to compare the preferences of the three groups in the
use of morphological, lexical, and syntactic degree markers. The results revealed that adjective–noun
agreement is affected to the same extent by both reduced input and reduced intake. The size of adjective
lexicons is also negatively affected by both, but more so by reduced exposure. However, production
of morphological degree markers and learning of semantic paradigms are areas of relative strength in
which bilinguals outperform monolingual children with DLD.We suggest that reduced input might be
counterbalanced by linguistic and cognitive advantages of bilingualism
Publication type
Journal article
Publication date
2018

Share this page