Project Details
Projekt
BiliSAT: Bilingual Language Development in School-age Children with/without Language Impairment with Arabic and Turkish as first languages
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2017 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 344870071
In Germany more and more children grow up multilingual: In the Federal Republic of Germany ca. 30% of all children were multilingual by the end of 2014. These numbers augment daily as children and adolescents arrive as refugees. Differentiating phenomena of second language acquisition (L2) from difficulties due to specific language impairment (SLI) is essential since, in school-age children, academic development is massively influenced by access to language support or therapy. On this background the project investigates L2-acquisition and the time course of SLI in multilingual school-age children in their home language (L1) and their L2. Age of onset (AoO), length of exposure (LoE), and the L1-acquisition context (i.e. has the home language been acquired in a minority (Germany) or in a majority (Turkey, Palestine, Syria etc.) context) as well as the specific situation of refugees will be given special attention. On the basis of available results for younger children and linguistically controlled assessment methods, the project aims at developing reliable criteria for the identification of SLI in multilingual school-age children. The investigation of Turkish and Arabic as home languages will enable us to obtain comparative, language dependent as well as independent, theoretical results and criteria for successful acquisition of a second language and the nature of SLI.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
