Measuring Grammatical Development in Bilingual Mandarin-English Speaking Children with a Sentence Repetition Task

Abstract

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been used to measure children's expressive language skills in normal and abnormal language development, and to examine the development of the speaking skills in second language acquisition, as well as to survey the proficiency of bilingual language development. Recently, SR tasks have been recognized as a potential psycholinguistic tool to identify bilingual children with language impairment. SR tasks are easy and quick to conduct, and a useful technique for obtaining quantitative and qualitative information about children's lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge, as well as language development in a complex linguistic background. This paper reports the results of a pilot study conducted to investigate the performance of SR among bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers, from age four to six. The task was conducted in both languages: Mandarin, and English, to examine the type of grammatical errors found among different age groups in the SR task. Studying the performance of SR in both languages could provide a better understanding of children's language learning and their acquisition pattern in both the first and second language. Overall task accuracy in each language was compared; grammatical errors in the SR task were described qualitatively. The results showed that the linguistic characteristic of the stimulus materials in Mandarin and English influences the performance of these bilingual children in the SR task. The study also showed that the grammatical errors found in the SR tasks may have the potential of being used to distinguish children with typical and atypical language development in the first language (L1).

Identifying Language Disorder Within a Migration Context: Development and Performance of a Pre-school Screening Tool for Children With German as a Second Language

“…In 2012, all children growing up with a language other than German attending 1 of 13 public pre-schools well-distributed over the central and less urbanized areas of Upper Austria were invited to participate in the pilot study (Study 1). After the exclusion of children with German as their dominant language and those with a length of German language exposure below 1 year [following ( 28 , 29 )], the final sample consisted of 112 children (49.1% girls) with a mean age of 57.4 months (SD = 4 months) and a mean length of exposure to German of 18.9 months (SD = 5.7 months). Note that the length of exposure is limited as children can be enrolled in pre-school at the earliest at the age of 3 years and the study focuses on children in their penultimate pre-school year.…”

The Morphosyntactic Abilities of Bilingual Malay Preschool Children Based on the Malay and English Sentence Repetition Tasks

“…In the SR task, sentence length and vocabulary are kept consistent to ensure that the children's memory will not be disproportionately affected in any structures or languages (Marinis & Armon-Lotem, 2015). So far, SR has been used by studies in numerous languages including Cantonese (Stokes et al, 2006), Italian (Vicari et al, 2002), and Mandarin (Woon et al, 2014).…”

Performance in Nonword Repetition Tasks among Mandarin- English Bilingual Children in Malaysia

“…The study reported in this paper was part of a larger study conducted to examine how typically developing simultaneous Mandarin-English bilingual children in Malaysia would perform in NWR and sentence repetition tasks conducted in English and Mandarin across the different age groups. However, due to space limitation, this paper will report only the findings from the NWR tasks (see Woon (2015) and Woon et al (2014) for a discussion of the sentence repetition tasks). Specifically, this paper addresses the following questions: 1) Is there a significant difference in the performance of Mandarin-English bilingual children across the different age groups on the Mandarin and English NWR tasks?…”