Complexity of syntactic structure in non-native language in bilingual children

Abstract

Serbian and Slovak are related languages and both languages belong to the group of Slavic languages. It is important to point out that bilingualism can have a negative impact on children's education, especially when they are not equally exposed to the use of both languages, as is the case with Slovaks in the Republic of Serbia. The aim of this paper is to determine the complexity of the syntactic structure in the non - mother tongue in bilingual children whose mother tongue is Slovak. The sample of children included forty children aged 7 years. The research was conducted at the Elementary School "Ljudovit Stur" in Kisac, and at the Elementary School "Jozef Marchok Dragutin" in Glozan. The assessment instruments used were: "Speech-language production test" and a bilingual questionnaire. The results obtained in this research speak in favor of a more complex syntactic sentence structure in bilingual children in their mother tongue compared to their non-mother tongue. We can conclude that bilingualism as a phenomenon has a great influence on the development of language, and thus on syntactic development. Slow language development can often occur due to the complexity of acquiring two languages at the same time.