Käändevormide kasutamise oskus eakohase arenguga vene-eesti kakskeelsetel ning spetsiifilise kõnearengu puudega ükskeelsetel lastel

This paper presents findings from a study examining Estonian case morphology usage by typically developing Russian-Estonian sequential bilingual and monolingual Estonian speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) aged 5–6. The control group included 5–6-year-old and 3-year-old monolingual typically developing Estonian children. Performance across groups was compared using the structured elicitation method. The findings suggest that children with SLI and typically developing bilingual children follow similar developmental paths in the early stages of grammatical acquisition. Moreover, the results reveal that the developmental patterns of both groups approximate those of monolingual Estonian language learners. Overall, the accuracy rates of case morphology production by bilingual children were lower than those of children with SLI. Both groups experienced more difficulties with the usage of the genitive, partitive, essive, terminative, abessive, and translative cases. The usage of locative grammatical cases (e.g. ablative, elative) in the secondary functions was limited as well. Both child groups basically made the same type of errors. However, qualitative analysis revealed that errors of omission of grammatical morphemes were more frequent in SLI children, while commission errors were more typical of bilingual children.