Zweitspracherwerb und die Spezifische Sprachentwicklungsstörung - Sprachprofile und elektrophysiologische Befunde

Abstract

The reliable diagnosis of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is difficult in a bilingual child: Often it cannot be determined whether a child still needs more time to acquire one or both languages or whether the child has a clinically-relevant language impairment such as SLI. Previous studies have revealed that phoneme discrimination as measured by the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) can serve as an indicator of receptive language proficiency and attunement to a specific linguistic environment. This dissertation identifies differences and similarities with respect to electrophysiological results and language profiles between bilingual and monolingual children with and without SLI. 12 bilingual Turkish-German children without SLI and 14 monolingual German-speaking children with and 16 without SLI were recruited. Further, results were compared with the language profiles of a small group of 6 Turkish-German children with SLI. Children were on average 64 months old and in the last year of kindergarten before school entry. German and Turkish language tests were used to assess the language abilities and parent questionnaires provided socio-demographic and language background information. The MMN was measured in an oddball paradigm using native-language and non-native language phoneme contrasts as well as non-linguistic stimuli. The bilingual children showed no MMN to the German phoneme contrast, whereas the monolingual German children with and without SLI did show an MMN. This means that the bilingual children have not achieved native-language phoneme recognition. The German phonological memory test showed significant differences between the monolingual children with SLI and the bilingual children without SLI. While the German phonological memory test has the potential to discriminate children with SLI from bilingual children without SLI, the electrophysiological results were not conclusive. Consequently, there is a need of further research in this field.