Paper Assignment #2: Diagnosing the cause of deviant language.

Please note: This paper will be due on Monday April 9th. It should be no longer than four pages, double-spaced.

Jean is a 6 year-old boy born to French parents who moved to Bloomington when he was 4. He is attending a public school and his teacher has contacted Jean's parents because she is concerned that his sentences contain unusual errors. She has read that children make language errors for many reasons including SLI, William's Syndrome, Autism, Mental Retardation, severe isolation, and Childhood Aphasia. You are a friend of the teacher and have been armed with a wealth of knowledge about language learning from the E105 course. The teacher calls on you before meeting with school officials and the parents to ask for your opinion on whether the cause of these unusual sentences might be one of these developmental disorders and to recommend methods that might be used to diagnose Jean's deviant language. Explain how you would rule out each of these potential diagnoses. Consider specific tests you might want to subject Jean to and specific questions you might pose to investigate the source of his errors. Offer specific interpretations of the possible results of your "detective work". Here is a list of sentences that the teacher has provided to demonstrate Jean's unusual errors. Try to provide an explanation for as many of these English errors as you can. We do not expect you to be familiar enough with French to recognize the source of the errors in sentences (1-4). Thus, we will not penalize misinterpretations you might make in your explanations of these sentences. However, we will focus on your explanations of sentences (5-11) to evaluate your understanding how structural principles of language might be used explain differences between particular languages and errors encountered when first learning a second language.

• I myself call "Jean".
• I have five years.
• Binford School, he is a school very amusing.
• I go to school each day, except the Saturdays.
• Me, I like very much the school at Bloomington.
• When make the children the homeworks?
• The children write not homework, only they talk and sing and play.
• I play always hide-and-seek.
• Sometimes I see not of other children.
• Where hide they, the others?
• Under which table snuck my friends?