Early emergence of syntactic awareness and cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children’s judgments

Abstract

Bilingual children sometimes perform better than same-aged monolingual children on metalinguistic awareness tasks, such as a grammaticality judgment. Some of these differences can be attributed to bilinguals having to learn to control attention to language choice. This study tested the hypothesis that bilingual children, as young as preschool age, would score overall higher than monolingual children on a grammaticality judgment test. French-English bilingual preschoolers judged the acceptability of three constructions in French and English (i.e. adjective-noun ordering, obligatoriness of a determiner, and object pronoun placement). Their performance was compared with that of a group of age-matched English monolinguals. The results showed that the bilingual children scored higher than the monolingual children. These results demonstrate that syntactic awareness develops quite early for bilinguals. Additionally, the bilingual children demonstrated cross-linguistic influence of core syntactic structure in French, as their judgments were affected by English acceptability.

Language learning from inconsistent input: Bilingual and monolingual toddlers compared

“…The structural sensitivity hypothesis aligns with earlier research showing that balanced bilingual children accept grammatically correct but semantically anomalous sentences, such as ‘Apples grow on noses’, more readily than their monolingual peers (e.g., Bialystok, ; Cromdal, ; Foursha‐Stevenson & Nicoladis, ), which suggests that bilingual children are better able to focus on structural properties of language rather than on meaning. Findings by Nation and McLaughlin () are less conclusive: These authors found that adult multilingual learners were better able to learn an implicit artificial grammar consisting of visually presented strings of letters compared to monolingual and bilingual learners.…”

“…Taken together, these earlier studies comparing monolingual and bilingual speakers' ability to judge grammatical structures (Bialystok, ; Cromdal, ; Foursha‐Stevenson & Nicoladis, ) and to learn novel structures (Kovács & Mehler, ; Kuo & Anderson, ; Kuo & Kim, ; Nation & McLaughlin, ) indicate that individuals with exposure to more than one language may show a greater readiness to impute linguistic structure. As outlined above, according to the structural sensitivity hypothesis, this bilingual advantage is likely to stem from two sources: (a) an advantage related to executive functioning, leading to enhanced cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control, and/or (b) increased salience of the structural properties of languages as a result of being exposed to two languages.…”

“…They argue, moreover, that bilingual infants' enhanced ability to extract structural regularities may be related to their precocious development of inhibitory control, which may help them to become more efficient language learners. Taken together, these earlier studies comparing monolingual and bilingual speakers' ability to judge grammatical structures (Bialystok, 1986;Cromdal, 1999;Foursha-Stevenson & Nicoladis, 2011) and to learn novel structures (Kovács & Mehler, 2009;Kuo & Anderson, 2012;Kuo & Kim, 2014;Nation & McLaughlin, 1986) indicate that individuals with exposure to more than one language may show a greater readiness to impute linguistic structure.…”

The language and literacy development of young dual language learners: A critical review

“…Using a sample of children ranging from two- to six-years in age, Foursha-Stevenson and Nicoladis (2011) found that French-English DLLs had better syntactic awareness than their monolingual peers. Similarly, Davidson, Raschke, and Pervez (2010) found that five- and six-year-old DLLs, who spoke Urdu and English, were better at identifying grammatically incorrect utterances than their Urdu- and English-speaking monolingual peers.…”

Examination of monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Spanish; English/Urdu) children's syntactic awareness

“…To date, there are inconsistencies regarding how bilingual children perform on syntactic awareness measures in comparison to their monolingual peers. In some cases, a bilingual advantage has been found (e.g., Bialystok, 1986;Cromdal, 1999;Davidson, Raschke, & Pervez, 2010;Foursha-Stevenson & Nicoladis, 2011), whereas other studies have not found differences between monolingual and bilingual children on syntactic awareness measures (Simard, Fortier, & Foucambert, 2013). Moreover, a handful of studies have shown a bilingual disadvantage on measures of syntactic awareness (e.g., Da Fontoura & Siegel, 1995;Lipka, Siegel, & Vukovic, 2005).…”