Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with developmental language disorder and Dutch–Russian simultaneous bilinguals: Disentangling the profiles

Bilingual children with reduced exposure to one or both languages may have language profiles that are apparently similar to those of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Children with DLD receive enough input, but have difficulty using this input for acquisition due to processing deficits. The present investigation aims to determine aspects of adjective production that are differentially affected by reduced input (in bilingualism) and reduced intake (in DLD). Adjectives were elicited from Dutch–Russian simultaneous bilinguals with limited exposure to Russian and Russian-speaking monolinguals with and without DLD. An antonym elicitation task was used to assess the size of adjective vocabularies, and a degree task was employed to compare the preferences of the three groups in the use of morphological, lexical, and syntactic degree markers. The results revealed that adjective–noun agreement is affected to the same extent by both reduced input and reduced intake. The size of adjective lexicons is also negatively affected by both, but more so by reduced exposure. However, production of morphological degree markers and learning of semantic paradigms are areas of relative strength in which bilinguals outperform monolingual children with DLD. We suggest that reduced input might be counterbalanced by linguistic and cognitive advantages of bilingualism.