Verb inflections as indicators of Bilingual SLI

This paper examines the verb inflectional system of 15 English-Hebrew preschool bilinguals: 6 typically developing (TD) bilinguals who attend regular preschools and 9 who attend “language preschools ” following a prior assessment for language impairment. Using a case studies approach and multiple tasks (sentence completion, sentence imitation and enactment), we found that all bilinguals had the same root infinitive error types in their L1 English. Those diagnosed with impairment in both languages as well as those diagnosed with impairment only in L2 Hebrew had significantly more errors than TD bilinguals. In Hebrew, all bilinguals had difficulty using person morphology in past tense, with a significant difference between TD bilinguals and the other bilinguals. A qualitative difference in the type of errors was found between bilinguals impaired in both languages and those impaired only in L2. Those impaired in both languages, like typically developing bilinguals and monolingual SLI children, had more substitutions while those impaired only in L2 tended toward omission errors. This error is unusual for monolingual Hebrew typical and impaired acquisition, but reflects difficulties with uninterpretable person features which are not available in their L1 English. We argue that the quantitative and qualitative differences when found in both languages can be indicative of SLI, while a qualitative difference only in the second language is not