Developmental profile: Hamida

From the onset of the study, Hamida’s written productions document her creative though not always target-like use of the linguistic means available for the purpose of recounting complex narrative events. While Hamida makes a progress in the attainment of the German grammar in the time span covered by this study, her written productions are characterised by a high degree of variation as she alternatively uses target-like and target-deviant structures. Complex narrative episodes are often expressed through a concatenation of propositions that are difficult to interpret at times, in particular, where sentence boundaries are not easy to establish. Text length remains relatively constant with an average of around 40 propositions.

Hamida’s narratives exhibit a remarkable variation regarding word order as of the onset of the study (cf. Table 4.17.). As of file 2, variation in verb place?ment and verb inflection, including numerous structural blends, is indicative of a syntax that seems to be overgenerating, possibly, because the headedness of the IP remains to be fixed. Variation in the left periphery provides evidence of a reorganisation phase bound to the implementation of the target V2 constraint. Worthy of mention is the substantial decrease of the error rate in the domain of verb inflection from 45.4% to 26.3% by the end of the study.

Table 4.17: Hamida’s German profile.

Table 4.77: continued