The German LITMUS Sentence Repetition and Non-word Repetition Tasks

The German LITMUS-SRT (Hamann et al., 2013) used in this study was constructed in close parallel to the French LITMUS-SRT (de Almeida et al., 2017; Fleckstein et al., 2018). It consists of 45 sentences divided in three levels of syntactic complexity (five conditions per level controlled for syllable number, three test items per condition). The degree of an item’s structural complexity relies on the presence of syntactic operations such as Wh-movement, clausal embedding, intervention⁹ – where the latter may add difficulty to the presence of two propositions. Accordingly, level 1 consists of simple declaratives (7–9 syllables) and focuses on Subject-Verb-Agreement (SVA), tense and the sentence bracket[see (1)]. Level 2 (9–13 syllables) includes two types of object questions: bare Wh-questions with the non-D-linked wh-operator (Wen “who-masc.-acc.”), and Which NP-questions with the discourse-linked wh-operator (Welchen “which-masc.-acc.”) followed by an intervening lexical noun phrase [see (2a) & (2b)]. Bare Wh-questions are considered to be structurally less complex since they do not involve intervention. Level 2 further contains non-finite and finite [see (3)] complement clauses. The latter are contrasted with coordinate structures, which serve as control items (two propositions but no embedding). Level 3 (11–12 syllables) comprises the most complex constructions and tests long passives, topicalizations [see (4)] as manifestations of the V2-property¹⁰ of German, subject relative clauses as well as object relative clauses with [see (5)] and without intervening lexical determiner phrases.

Note that German has morphological case marking on accusative masculine singular pronouns, such as the interrogative and relative pronouns in examples 2a, 2b, and 5. Table 1 gives an overview of test conditions. For more details on German LITMUS-SRT, we refer to Hamann et al. (2017) and Hamann and Abed Ibrahim (2017).

German LITMUS-SRT: Overview of test conditions.

Sentence bracket:

Der Prinz hat die Prinzessin umarmt

The/nom. prince has the/acc. princess hugged

“The prince hugged the princess”

Bare WH

Wen beißt der große Löwe immer?

Who/acc. bites the/nom. big lion always?

“Who(m) does the big lion always bite?”

Which-NP

Welchen Bauern ärgert der Affe?

Which/acc. peasant annoys the/nom. monkey?

“Which peasant does the monkey annoy?”

Finite complement clause:

Der Wikinger glaubt, dass die hexe ihn mag.

The/nom. viking believes, that the/nom. witch him likes

“The viking believes that the witch likes him”

Topicalization

Den Arzt fotografiert der Bauer gerne

The/acc. doctor photographs the/nom. peasant gladly

“The doctor, the peasant photographs gladly”

Object relative with intervention:

Ich sehe den Vogel, den der Pinguin weckt.

I see the/acc. bird who/acc. the/nom. penguin wakes up

“I see the bird who(m) the penguin wakes up”

The test stimuli are pre-recorded, pseudo-randomized and integrated into a child friendly PowerPoint Presentation. The administration of the task takes about 10 minutes. The task is scored both by identical repetition of test items (SRT_Id), i.e., whole item accuracy, where only phonological errors are disregarded, and by correct target structure (SRT_Tar), which measures whether a particular structure has been mastered or not (see Marinis and Armon-Lotem, 2015 for scoring measures). Although scoring by SRT_Id is faster and easier, L2-errors not affecting the realization of the targeted structure such as lexical substitutions, omissions and systematic recurrent case¹¹ as well as gender errors could surface using this scoring method and penalize bilingual children. Comparison of these scoring methods has indeed shown that SRT_Tar leads to higher diagnostic accuracy of the test for German (see Hamann and Abed Ibrahim, 2017 for particulars).

The German LITMUS-NWRT (Grimm et al., 2014) employed in this study is composed of two parts: a structurally less complex (quasi-) language independent part (NWRT_LI) and a language dependent part (NWRT_LD) incorporating more complex structural aspects. In both parts the item length ranges from one to three syllables with constant word-initial stress. The 30 items of the LI part were constructed using phonemes and phonotactic constraints attested in the vast majority of the world’s languages (Maddieson et al., 2011), i.e., phonemes that are “compatible with cross-linguistically diverse constraints on lexical phonology” (Chiat, 2015, p. 138). Unlike the non-words of the Quasi-Universal-NWRT discussed in Chiat and Polišenská (2016), the non-words of the German LITMUS-NWRT are shorter and are not only composed of simple CV sequences, but also include syllables with initial consonant clusters “#CCV” or closed syllables of the type “CVC#,” which are typologically well-attested albeit their relative complexity (Maddieson, 2006). Throughout the task, phonological complexity is systematically varied at the segmental (consonantal), syllabic (presence of branching onsets or coda) or sequential (position of cluster within the non-word) levels (see dos Santos and Ferré, 2018; Grimm and Hübner, in press for details). The LD part contains 36 items adhering to the same construction principles of the LI part in addition to the extrametrical /s, ʃ/ in word initial and final positions as a complexity feature specific to German (and some other languages, e.g., English and Russian). Such sC sequences violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle and are considered phonologically more complex than other types of onset clusters. Constructed as such, the LD_part is considered to be structurally more complex compared to the LI_part, yet less dependent on LS knowledge than the more traditional Language-Specific NWRTs, e.g., Rispens and Baker (2012), which draw on the full phoneme inventory (consonants and vowels) and include many more properties specific to the target language (Chiat, 2015; Chiat and Polišenská, 2016).

Although structures with higher phonological complexity are generally more error-prone in TD children, they are “disproportionately difficult” for children with SLI (Chiat, 2015, p. 137), who struggle with phonological complexity (Archibald and Gathercole, 2006; Jones et al., 2010; dos Santos and Ferré, 2018). Thus, a greater performance gap between TD and SLI is expected for both monolingual and bilingual children on NWRT_LD, which contains trilateral sCC onset clusters, where /s/ and /ʃ/ represent an appendix to the prosodic word. The latter has been shown to be deficient in phonologically impaired monolingual German children (Ott et al., 2006). An overview of segments and syllable types is given in Table 2.

Overview of segments and syllable types in German LITMUS-NWRT.

Task administration takes about 5 min and the non-words are presented to the child in a pseudo-randomized order via an animated PowerPoint Presentation. At the beginning of the task, children are provided with noise-canceling headphones and are told that an alien from another planet would appear on the screen and try to teach them his language (format adapted from Engel de Abreu et al., 2013). The test is scored by whole item accuracy (percentage of items correct), since this scoring method is better suited for clinical purposes and has been shown to be informative (Roy and Chiat, 2004; Boerma et al., 2015). A response is rated as correct if all consonants and vowels in addition to their sequencing correspond to the target form. Phoneme omissions, substitutions or additions are regarded as incorrect. Systematic phoneme replacements reflecting articulatory difficulties, e.g., /t/ for /k/ (/kafip/→/tafip/) are not counted as errors. Since the task mainly targets bilingual children, L2-errors such as voicing of consonants (/pilu/→/bilu/) or vowel alternations (/faku/→/fako/) are disregarded. Furthermore, substitution of extrametrical /ʃ/ through [s] or an interdental pronunciation of extrametrical /s/ are not counted as errors since this does not result in a phonemic contrast in extrametrical positions in German (Grimm and Hübner, in press).