“Which mouse kissed the frog?”Effects of age of onset, length of exposure, and knowledge of case marking on the comprehension ofwh-questions in German-speaking simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children

Abstract

Studies examining age of onset (AoO) effects in childhood bilingualism have provided mixed results as to whether early sequential bilingual children (eL2) differ from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) and L2 children on the acquisition of morphosyntax. Differences between the three groups have been attributed to other factors such as length of exposure (LoE), language abilities, and the phenomenon to be acquired. The present study investigates whether four- to five-year-old German-speaking eL2 children differ from 2L1 children on the acquisition of wh-questions, and whether these differences can be explained by AoO, LoE, and/or knowledge of case marking. The 2L1 children outperformed the eL2 children in terms of accuracy; however, both bilingual groups exhibited similar error patterns. This suggests that 2L1 and eL2 bilingual children are sensitive to the same morphosyntactic cues, when comprehending wh-questions. Finally, children's performance on the different types of wh-questions was explained by a combination of knowledge of case marking, LoE, and AoO.

Syntactic development in early foreign language learning: Effects of L1 transfer, input, and individual factors

“…For child L2 learners of German, Roesch and Chondrogianni (2016) find that early sequential French-German bilingual children aged 4 to 5 years (mean age of acquisition to German: 3 years, 1 month) demonstrate a similar subject preference in the interpretation of wh-questions as monolingual German and simultaneous German-French bilingual children of the same ages. However, in a picture selection task, the bilingual groups differed in their interpretation strategies of wh-questions in which case-marking on the second noun phrase (NP) disambiguated the question ("Welche Maus malt der NOM /den ACC Frosch an?…”

“…For complex syntax in L2 production, Paradis et al (2017) find length of exposure, richness of the L2 environment at home, verbal working memory, and analytical reasoning scores as well as L2 vocabulary to be predictors of the amount of English sentences consisting of more than one clause. Finally, for the comprehension of wh-questions, Roesch and Chondrogianni (2016) report that both length of exposure and age of onset account for mastery of object-wh questions.…”

“…This study focuses on the interpretation of wh-questions and relative clauses. The development of questions and relative clauses has been much studied in monolingual child development (e.g., Durrleman, Marinis, & Franck, 2016) and is beginning to receive attention in child L2 acquisition (Roesch & Chondrogianni, 2016). Crucially, L1 transfer affects wh-questions and relative clauses in adult FL development (e.g., Grüter, 2006;Hopp, 2017;Rankin, 2014), making them suitable test cases for transfer effects in early FL syntactic development.…”

The role of case and animacy in bi-and monolingual children’s sentence interpretation in German: a developmental perspective

“…Case marking cues seem only to be strengthened when additional cues are available. Such additional cues can be prosodic marking (Grühnloh et al 2011), construction-specific usage (Brandt et al 2016) or the availability of two case-marked elements (Roesch & Chondrogianni 2015). Whenever such supporting cues are not available, case markers are outcompeted by constituent order, which means that a syntactic interpretation strategy is preferred.…”

“…Studies addressing processing strategies in bilingual children have not, at least to our knowledge, addressed the question of cue adjustment. Instead, focus has been laid on group-specific differences either between L1 and L2 (Cristante 2016) or between different types of bilingual children (i.e., children differing in terms of age of onset) and monolingual peers (Roesch & Chondrogianni 2015). The studies show that, in non-canonical conditions with case marking cues, bilingual children generally show a poorer performance and seem to adopt a stronger syntactic interpretation strategy than their monolingual peers.…”