Basque-Spanish bilingual children’s expressive and receptive grammatical abilities

Abstract

Expressive-receptive gaps in lexical abilities have been documented for bilingual children, but few studies have investigated whether a similar gap is observed at the grammatical level. The current study assessed grammatical abilities through sentence production and comprehension tasks in both languages in 17 Basque-Spanish simultaneous bilingual 6- through 9-year-olds (both languages acquired before three years of age). The children scored lower in Basque than Spanish for sentence production, but no significant differences were found for sentence comprehension. While an expressive-receptive gap was found for both languages, this gap was larger in Basque than in Spanish. Object-verb agreement errors were especially prevalent in Basque production, possibly because verbs in Spanish only agree with the subject. These results demonstrate that expressive-receptive gaps are also observed in bilingual children’s grammatical abilities and may vary depending on the structural similarity between the two languages.

Experimental methods to study atypical language development

“…A "grammatical gap"-better performance in morphosyntactic comprehension than production-has also been reported in bilingual children (Anderson et al, 2019;Pourquié et al, 2019) and bilinguals perform on par with the monolinguals in comprehension but not production tasks (Pratt et al, 2020). This is a good testing ground to disentangle DLD from bilinguals' impaired grammatical production because, in children with DLD, comprehension seems to be more problematic than in typically developing bilinguals.…”

“HEGA”: the Basque version of the PaBiQ parental questionnaire, for clinicians and educators working in the Basque multilingual environment

“…Another factor that might contribute to the expressivereceptive gap is linguistic typology. Anderson et al (2019) presented evidence for such a gap in the grammatical abilities of school-aged Basque-Spanish bilingual children and found it to be wider regarding 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1211548 Frontiers in Psychology 12 frontiersin.org grammatical structures that are not shared between the languages of the child. This proposal would merit to be investigated more thoroughly, for example by comparing bilinguals with a combination of languages that are either typologically related or unrelated, and with a comparable amount of language experience in the L2.…”

“…To our knowledge no parental questionnaire is commonly used in the Basque Country for collecting information on the multilingual experience of Basque-speaking children. Some clinical, educational, and research centers use their own questionnaires ( Anderson et al, 2019 ) and some questionnaires seem to be restricted to specific studies (e.g., Barreña et al, 2008b ). Therefore, there is a need for the development of an easy-to-use parental questionnaire to be shared among the Basque community, in order to improve research, education and clinical practices adapted to the Basque multilingual environment.…”