1 PRE-PRINT Reilly, J., Bernicot, J., Olive, T., Uzé, J

PRE-PRINT
Reilly, J., Bernicot, J., Olive, T., Uzé, J., Wulfeck, B., Favart, M. & Appelbaum, M. (2012,
accepté). Written Narratives from French and English Speaking Children with
Language Impairment. In B. Arfé, V & J. Dockrell & V. Berninger (Eds). Handbook of
writing development and instruction in children with language difficulties. Oxford:
University Press.
Written Narratives from French and English Speaking Children with Language Impairment
Judy S. Reilly
San Diego State University and Université de Poitiers-CNRS
Josie Bernicot
Université de Poitiers-CNRS
Thierry Olive
Université de Poitiers-CNRS
Joël Uzé
CRTL-Centre Hospitalier H. Laborit, Poitiers
Beverly Wulfeck
San Diego State University
Monik Favart
Université de Poitiers-CNRS
Mark Appelbaum
University of California, San Diego
To appear in
Handbook of writing development and instruction in children with language difficulties,
B. Arfé, V & J. Dockrell & V. Berninger, Eds. Oxford University Press.
Correspondence concerning the chapter should be addressed to:
Judy Reilly
Department of Psychology,
San Diego State University
6330 Alvarado Court, #208
San Diego, California 92120 USA
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Introduction
Most typically developing children are good speakers of their native language by
about five years of age and, as they enter school, they begin to acquire its graphic
representation - writing. However, children with Language Impairment (LI) experience
problems in acquiring both spoken and written language and studies that have considered
the written language of children with LI have found these problems to be persistent. But
these studies have been limited to children acquiring English as their first language. To
better understand both the process of writing development and the nature of Language
Impairment, this chapter investigates the written language of children with LI and typically
developing children acquiring either French or American English as their native language.
To contextualize our writing study, we first present a brief overview of language
impairment and a short comparison of French and English grammar and their writing
systems.
Children with Language Impairment are typically developing children with no
known neurological, emotional, or hearing problems and yet they demonstrate significant
difficulties in acquiring their native language. The majority of children who receive a
diagnosis of Language Impairment as they enter primary school have a documented history
of initial delay in the onset of language and persistent problems in expressive language
through the school years, notably with grammatical morphology (e.g. Fey, Catts, ProctorWilliams, Tomblin, & Zhang (2004), Leonard (1998), and Rice, Wexler, & Cleave(1995)). In
addition, some children with LI also exhibit concomitant problems in receptive language
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(Leonard, 1998). While a subset of children with LI appear to “catch up” in their spoken
language abilities (e.g., Bishop & Edmonson, 1987), many continue to show subtle deficits
in spoken language with more severe problems in written language (Bishop & Clarkson
(2003), Dockrell, Lindsay, Connelly, & Mackie (2007), Gillam & Johnston (1992), and Scott
& Windsor (2000)). As noted above, the vast majority of such studies, especially on writing,
have been conducted with children and adolescents acquiring English. In this chapter we
compare the written language of children and adolescents with LI who are acquiring
French as their first language with those learning English to investigate: 1) what is common
across the LI groups; and 2) the role of the particular language on the LI profile.
Before we present our study, a brief background on written English and French will
provide background. French is a Romance language whereas English is part of the
Germanic family. French has a highly developed system of inflectional morphology in which
nouns are marked for gender (masculine/feminine) and number (singular or plural) and
articles and adjectives agree in both gender and number with the noun they modify (la
petite fille, le petit garçon, les petites filles, les petits garçons). Verbs are inflected for
number, person and tense. In addition, the pronominal system is complex, marking person,
number and case; object and reflexive clitics are preverbal. In contrast, English has lost
most of its inflectional morphology, although plural is marked for nouns, and verbs have a
third person singular –s in the present tense. In English, this impoverished morphology is
phonologically realized whereas in French, much of the inflectional morphology is silent,
posing a particular challenge for children learning to write.
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With respect to written French and English, Modern English results from a series of
historical changes and was strongly influenced by the introduction of French at the time of
the Norman invasion of Britain in the 11th century, thus English orthography is a
composite of different subsystems of spelling (principally Germanic, Norman-French, and
Latin-Greek). Both French and English have deep or opaque orthographies and English has
probably one of the most difficult and complex spelling–to-sound correspondences (see
Share, 1995, 2008). In fact, the major source of spelling difficulties results from the lack of
correspondence between pronunciation of the words and their spelling. However, French
also presents difficulties in that the French morphological system is highly complex, and its
inflectional morphology is more or less silent. For example, in class 1 verbs –er verbs, the
inflectional endings for first (je parle); second (tu parles); and third person singular (elle, il
parle), as well as third person plural (ils, elles parlent) all share the same pronunciation
[parl], however, they have distinct written forms.
To highlight these differences and the challenges posed to beginning writers, we
present the same sentence in French and English:
The little girl met her friend at the café and
then they climbed the hill to go home.
La petite fille a rencontré sa copine au café et
puis elles sont montées la colline pour aller
chez elle.
(agreement markers for gender and number
are underlined)
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In summary, our goal is to see how these linguistic differences affect the acquisition
of writing in French and English students, both those who are typically developing and
those who are Language Impaired, as well as how these profiles change with age and
experience.
The Study
Seventeen French speaking children and adolescents (ages 7-16) with LI and 31
typically developing (TD) age matched peers provided codable written stories as did 30
American English speaking participants with LI and 60 TD. In both language communities,
children with Language Impairment were diagnosed by local speech language pathologists.
To be included in the LI group, with the criteria included a significant language impairment
in oral language in the absence of hearing impairment, frank neurologic deficits (seizure,
CP, stroke) or significant social/emotional disorders. The child must have a non-verbal IQ
score above 80, as well as score 1.5 or more Standard Deviations below the mean on a
standardized language test of oral language (e.g., CELF-R).
To address how growing up in a particular language community affects learning to
write, we asked children and adolescents to write a story about a time when someone had
made them mad or sad. After the children had written their stories, they were given an
opportunity to read the story aloud and to edit their texts. Table 1 presents example texts
from French and English speaking children, both typically developing and from those with
Language Impairment.
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***Insert Table 1 here ***
In assessing their written narratives we looked at a variety of linguistic indices: the
length of their written narratives, the nature and rate of morphological and spelling errors,
and finally, the use and types of complex syntax. Length was counted as the number of
clauses; a clause is defined as a verb and its arguments. Morphological errors were both
errors of commission and omission and included, for example, errors in number and
gender agreement, subject-verb agreement, and verb tense. The total number of errors was
divided by the total number of clauses to yield a proportion of errors. Complex sentences
included, for example, clefts, those with verb complements, relative clauses, coordinate and
subordinate connectors. Similar to the calculations for morphological errors, the total
number of complex sentences was divided by the number of clauses to create a proportion
of complex syntax. Spelling errors were tallied and the total was divided by the number of
words in the text.
Results and Discussion
Statistical Approach
The statistical results reported below are tests of simple effects which, essentially, test for
group differences at specific levels of one or more other factors, e.g. TD-LI differences for
French writers. These tests are different from plain t-tests within subgroups because in the tests
of simple effects the entire data set, as opposed to a subset, is used to estimate the error variance
and degrees of freedom for the statistical tests and the degrees of freedom are generally greater in
the test of simple effects.
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Story length (clauses)
As can be seen in Figure 1, in English but not French, the samples differed in the
length of their stories as measured by the number of clauses. Specifically, the TD group of
English speakers wrote longer stories than the LI group (t=3.61, df=134, p<.001), whereas
for the French groups, stories did not differ significantly in length across the two
populations. And, as we see in Figure 2, separating the groups into children (ages 7-11) and
adolescents (12-16), does not reveal statistically significant differences in performance by
age for any of the four groups, that is, French TD, French LI, nor English TD nor English LI.
However in the typically developing group of French students, there is a small
(t=1.83,df=130,p=.069) trend toward longer stories in the adolescents than in the younger
writers, but small numbers prevent our being able to make a strong statement.
***Insert Figures 1 and 2 here***
Morphology
As noted above, an important difference in English and French is in inflectional
morphology. To calculate rates of morphological errors (and complex syntax), we used the
number of clauses in each as a denominator to control for varying lengths of the children’s
narratives. As can be seen in Figure 3, it appears that the French morphological system
does indeed play an important role in the development of writing. Looking at Figure 3, for
both the French and the English speaking children, the LI groups makes significantly more
errors than their typically developing peers; for French writers t=3.54,df=134,p<.001 and
for English writers t=2.13, df=134, p=.035. In addition, the French writers, both TD and LI
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groups, make significantly more morphological errors than their English speaking
counterparts t=11.57, df=134, p<.001. As such, the complexity and relative silence of
French morphology clearly pose a challenge for all French students.
However if we again split the groups into younger and older (Figure 4), we see that
both the older TD French group(t=4.37, df=130, p<.001) and the older LI French group(t2.04, df=130, p=.043) make markedly fewer morphological errors than do their younger
French counterparts; as such, both typically developing children and those with LI seem to
be acquiring the French written system. For the English speakers, there are no statistically
significant differences between the age groups in error rate: both younger and older LI
groups make more errors than their TD peers. In sum, we see that age, language and
neurodevelopmental status (TD vs LI) play a role: French students master the written
morphology later than their English counterparts, but both French and English participants
with LI continue to struggle with written morphology.
***Insert Figures 3 and 4 here****
Complex Syntax
Whereas problems in grammatical morphology are a hallmark of Language
Impairment, studies have also reported decreased use of complex syntax in narratives (e.g.,
Reilly et al., 2004; Scott & Windsor, 2000). To investigate the rate of complex sentences we
calculated the frequency with which children used complex syntax by constructing
proportions of complex structures divided by story length in clauses. Using complex or
simple sentences is a rhetorical choice; simple sentences are perfectly grammatical.
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However, using complex sentences, e .g. I had played a baseball game the day before, so I
was sick and tired of baseball, makes explicit the relation between two (or more) events and
increases the density of information. In comparing complex sentence rates, we found that
for both language groups, the LI groups use less complex syntax than the controls; for
French writers, t=3.16,df=134, p=.002, for English writers t=1.96, df=134,
p=.05.,Interestingly, the English speaking groups used relatively more complex sentences
than the French speaking participants (t=4.40,df=134,p<.001)as can be seen in Figure 5.
Looking across age groups (Figure 6), we see that for both languages the LI adolescents
used more complex syntax than their younger counterparts (for French, t=2.62,df=130,
p=.010; for English t=2.26, df=130, p=.026).
*****Insert Figure 5 and 6 here*****
What might explain such differences in syntactic profiles of the French and English
students? According to studies of discourse that have looked at rhetorical styles across
languages, English is characterized as one that relies heavily on hypotaxis or subordination,
whereas French tends more towards isotaxis or favoring independent clauses over
subordination. Interestingly, both French and English have a broad repertoire of sentence
types; both languages include simple clauses, coordinate clauses and multiple types of
subordination (e.g., clefts, relative and adverbial clauses). However, data from adult
writers show preferences for particular syntactic constructions (Nir and Berman, 2010);
specifically, adult French writers prefer simple over subordinate clauses whereas English
writers use increased subordination. Interestingly, these same preferences of syntactic
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style are evident in the children’s writing as well. What is striking is that this feature of
how language is used, that is, the preference for independent or subordinate clauses, is
evident in the LI as well as the TD groups. Thus, it is not only that all these children are
learning to write French or English, they are also learning the rhetorical style, in this case,
the syntactic preferences for written language of their linguistic community.
Spelling
Finally we look at spelling in these two languages. Both have opaque writing
systems, irregular sound-letter correspondences, and a substantial number of silent letters.
In English, but not in French, (see Figure 7) the children with LI make more errors than
their typically developing peers (t=3.04, df=134, p=.003), and in both languages, in both the
TD and LI groups, the adolescents make fewer errors than younger children (see Figure 8);
for French TD, t=2.41,p=.017, for French LI, t=2.55, p=.012, for English TD, t=2.40, p=.018,
and for English LI, t=3.51,p,.001. All tests are based on df=130. In short, everyone is
learning to spell.
*****Insert Figures 7 and 8 here*****
When we look more closely at the errors of the children, there are some interesting
linguistic and group differences. Many spelling errors from the TD groups are
phonologically plausible, e.g., sistr for sister in English and metrese for maîtresse in French.
However, errors from the LI group also included more phonologically implausible spellings
as in uling for ugly. Across languages, errors in English were largely word internal, e.g.,
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herd for heard. In contrast, in French, a sizeable number of errors were segmentation
errors. Table 2 contains some examples of these types of errors. This difference may
reflect the differing stress patterns of English and French where English stress is word
delineated while French is a syllable timed language. In sum, both the structure of the
language and the child’s age and neurodevelopmental status affect his ability to spell.
***Insert Table 2 about here***
Conclusions
In conclusion, we see that Language Impairment has significant effects on children’s
writing. Students with LI make more morphosyntactic errors, use less complex syntax and
make more spelling errors in their writing than their typically developing peers. However,
students, both typically developing and those with Language Impairment also very much
reflect the language community in which they are growing up: French morphology is more
challenging than that of English, regardless of group; French writers, both TD and LI, use
less complex syntax in their writing than their English speaking counterparts. In sum,
learning to write poses a greater challenge for children with Language Impairment than
their typically developing peers, but both the structure of the target language, as well as the
community’s rhetorical preferences define and shape this challenge.
Acknowledgement: This work was in part supported by P50 NS22343: Neurological Bases of
Language, Learning and Cognition. We would like to thank Stephanie Chaminaud, Lucie Broc,
and Jun O’Hara for their help with transcription and data coding, Julian Parris for graphics, and the
staff at PCND for collecting the children’s stories. We are especially grateful to the children and
their families who generously participated in these studies.
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References
Bishop, D.V.M. & Clarkson, B. (2003). Written Language as a window into residual language
deficits: A study of children with persistent and residual speech and Language
Impairments. Cortex, 39, 215-237.
Bishop, D. V. M. & Edmundson, A. (1987). Language-impaired 4-year-olds: Distinguishing
transient from persistent impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 52, 156–
173.
Dockrell, J.E., Lindsay, G. Connelly, V., & Mackie,C. (2007). Constraints in the Production of
Written Text in Children With Specific Language Impairment Exceptional Children;
Winter 2007; 73, 2, 147-164.
Fey, M. E., Catts, H. W., Proctor-Williams, K., Tomblin, J. B., & Zhang, X. (2004). Oral and
written story composition skills of children with language impairment. Journal of Speech,
Language, and Hearing Research, 47, 1301–1318.
Gillam, R. B., & Johnston, J. (1992). Spoken and written language relationships in
language/learning-impaired and normally achieving school age children. Journal of
Speech and Hearing Research, 35(6), 1303–1315.
Leonard, L. (1998). Children with Specific Language Impairment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Nir, B., & Berman, R. (2010). Complex syntax as a window on contrastive rhetoric
Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 744–765.
Rice, M., Wexler, K., & Cleave, P. (1995). Specific language impairment as a period of
extended optional infinitive. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38, 850–863.
Scott, C. M., & Windsor, J. (2000). General language performance measures in spoken and
written narrative and expository discourse of school-age children with language learning
disabilities. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 43, 324–339.
Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading
acquisition. Cognition, 55, 151–218.
Share, D. L. (2008). On the Anglocentricities of current reading research and practice: The
perils of overreliance on an" outlier" orthography. Psychological Bulletin, 134 (4),
584-615.
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Table 1. Example Narrative Texts from English and French Speaking Children
English Written Narratives
Caroline (TD) 9;0
Sometimes my best friend, Brianna’, makes me mad. When we play handball, sometimes I get her out. She starts crying and tells a teacher. The
teacher tells her to be a good sport and Brianna won’t talk to me the rest of
the day. That was last year. Now she rarely get_ mad a me, let alone at
hand-ball. When I do get her out, she is a good sport but sometimes she
passes back the ball a bit harsh__ as if she were silently fuming.
Laura (LI) 9;1
I drow a picer f for my friend a and it make her fill good.
I drew a picture for my friend and it made her feel good*.
French Written Narratives
Célia (TD) 9:9
Le matin moi et Flavie ont étaient copine_ et quand je revien_ l’après midi
elle n’ait n’était plus ma copine. Elle me dit c’est parce-que tu ne joue_ pas
avec moi. Je lui répons que je joue toujours avec elle. Et Flavie me dit je n’ai
suis plus ta copine. Et Flavie me dit qu’elle n’ait plus ma copine.
Coralie (LI) 9 ; 6
C’est un copine et c’est bas caré avec ma cousine à mon anniverser_
C’est une copine qui s’est bagarrée avec ma cousine à mon anniversaire
*Italicized version is what the child read back to the experimenter and is
included for clarity. Errors are underlined.
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Table 2. Spelling Errors in English and French from Written Narratives from
Students with Language Impairment
Errors in English
Errors in French
•stcay: Stacy*
•mavoler: m’a volé
•trae: trash
•Ses té: c’ était
•chufball: trouble
•commen ses: commencer
•thone: threw
•alecole: à l’ école
•a stopon: accept
•bas caré: bagarré
•srtr: shirt
•le caleuabe: l’escalope
•hirrind: Harrington
•cuisiniaire: cuisinière
*target word
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