Abstract
By tradition, comparisons between first and second language acquisition involve data from child or adult L2 learners and data from young L1 children. However, there is a subgroup of L1 children, namely children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), which is rarely accounted for in these comparisons. These are children with significant problems in acquiring their mother tongue despite growing up in a monolingual environment. In this paper, Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998) is used as a framework to compare the development of morphosyntax in three groups of children: L1 children, L2 children and children with SLI. Contrary to expectations, the results show that the development of grammar in children with SLI sometimes is more similar to the grammatical development in L2 acquisition than that in L1 acquisition. A similarity between these two groups has implications for theories about language acquisition and language impairment.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Crosslinguistic aspects of Processability Theory |
| Editors | Manfred Pienemann |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company |
| ISBN (Print) | 90-272-4141-4 |
| Publication status | Published - 2005 |
Bibliographical note
The information about affiliations in this record was updated in December 2015.The record was previously connected to the following departments: Linguistics and Phonetics (015010003)
Subject classification (UKÄ)
- General Language Studies and Linguistics
Free keywords
- L1
- SLI
- Language acquisition
- L2