It's April and I'm already thinking about Puerto Vallarta! I have to get ready for the presentation and I'm excited about sharing what I've learned this year. I'm sure the other presenters are just as excited about the coming Bilingual Symposium in August. I hope that you're making plans to join the group and network with other bilingual clinicians. It'll be a great time to work on your Spanish and develop your gender agreement! I mean that linguistically.
I've always wondered why gender agreement is so difficult for children and adults who speak Spanish. I know that there is some old literature by Gustavo Gonzales that talks about children who are learning English, lose their ability for gender agreement after the age of 6. This continues into adulthood for those who have not practiced speaking Spanish or have limited use for Spanish. I hear it especially with the irregular forms.
There are two articles that address this issue that I would recommend reading. They come from different perspectives and research designs, but they bring into light the information we need about gender agreement and its use among children who are learning English and may be losing the native language, Spanish. More importantly how this may be used to identify children with language impairments. The first article is with typically developing children who are losing the home language, Spanish. The second article compares children with specific language impairment with typical Spanish speaking. Both groups of children are approximately the same age but Anderson's subjects are not typical in the sense that the parents are highly educated. Obviously there has been some great effort in maintaining the home language but the children still have a pattern of home language loss. Both articles have excellent literature reviews concerning the development of gender agreement in children.
I primarily evaluate Spanish-English speaking preschool children who are language impaired. They usually have moderate to severe phonological processes, and limited receptive and expressive language. So, my experience with these children has been limited when it comes to gender agreement. If they use gender, they probably are typical. But those children who are referred after 1 or 2 years of Head Start and obviously have lost the native language, are different. There is still some semblance of grammar and gender. I usually see a filler of some sort for gender. I wonder if receptive knowledge of gender placement is still there even though the expressive use of gender is not. Restrepo and Gutierrez-Clellen site a study (Bortolini et al., 1997) with Italian-speaking children that found no differences in comprehension of articles between SLI and typical children. So the problem may be production for these children.
I hope that your school district doesn't depend on standardized tests primarily to place bilingual children into special services. And I do hope that you're looking at other variables and behaviors besides the results that you get from a test. Gender agreement, another possibility for the determination of language difference versus language disorder. HK
1. Anderson, R. (1999). Loss of gender agreement in L1 attrition: Preliminary results. Bilingual Research Journal, V. 23, N. 4 pp. 389-408.
The purpose of the present investigation was to obtain preliminary data on the effects of first language (L1) loss on the Spanish of bilingual children, particularly with respect to noun phrases (NP) gender agreement. Two children, bilingual in English and Spanish, were followed longitudinally and their use of gender agreement was examined. Data on incidence and type of NP gender agreement errors were obtained. Results of the investigation suggest that Spanish gender agreement morphology may be vulnerable to language loss. Nevertheless, differences in relative impact of L1 loss on gender agreement varied among the children. In contrast to previous research with Spanish-speaking children who are learning English as a second language and who have language impairment, it appears that gender errors are the result of the language contact situation, and not because of language learning deficits. Possible reasons for the observed patterns and directions for future research are presented.
2. Restrepo, M.A. & Gutierrez-Clellen V. (2001). Article use in Spanish-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment. J. Child Language. 28, 433-452.
The current study analyzed article use in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment who are learning English as a second language. The Surface hypothesis account of specific language impairment was evaluated in relation to the use of articles in these children. Language samples were obtained from 15 Spanish-speaking children with language impairment and 15 with normal language, ages 5;0 to 7;1, matched by age, gender, and school. The percentage of article errors was tested between groups with a nonparametric analysis and an analysis of covariance with mean length of terminable unit as the covariate. Results revealed significant differences between groups on percent of article errors with and without MLTU as the covariate. Nonparametric statistics on percent of article error types indicated that most errors consisted of omissions and gender agreement substitutions. As predicted by the Surface Hypothesis, article errors were likely to occur in unstressed definite articles, suggesting that perceptual and prosodic processes have some impact on children's production of articles.
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