Unbalanced bilingual acquisition as a mechanism of grammatical change

Matthews, Stephen; Yip, Virginia

doi:10.1017/s1366728910000593

“…competence) in each language (Genesee & Nicoladis, 2007;Pearson, Fernández, & Oller, 1993). Relative differences in proficiency in each language can be modulated by various factors, including variation in relative language input and age of acquisition (Matthews & Yip, 2011). Because of the variation in linguistic backgrounds and relative language proficiency, it is difficult to say what is considered "typical" language development in bilingual children (e.g., Matthews & Yip, 2011;Unsworth, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Relative differences in proficiency in each language can be modulated by various factors, including variation in relative language input and age of acquisition (Matthews & Yip, 2011). Because of the variation in linguistic backgrounds and relative language proficiency, it is difficult to say what is considered "typical" language development in bilingual children (e.g., Matthews & Yip, 2011;Unsworth, 2013). This can, for example, result in difficulties distinguishing whether a child's errors are caused by simply learning a second language or from developmental language disorders such as Specific Language Impairment (Armon-Lotem, de Jong, & Meir, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Anderson

¹

,

Giezen

²

,

Pourquié

³

2019

LAB

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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.

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

Anderson

¹

,

Giezen

²

,

Pourquié

³

2021

Benjamins Current Topics

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

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Evidence against a link between learning phonotactics and learning phonological alternations

Do

¹

,

Yeung

²

2021

Linguistics Vanguard

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Phonological alternations often happen to conform to phonotactic regularities, from which a single mechanism for phonotactics and alternations has been claimed. We note, however, that empirical evidence supporting the link between phonotactics and alternations comes only from English native speakers whose first language (L1) does exhibit phonotactically motivated alternation patterns. This article examines whether the link between phonotactics and alternations is universally available. To do so, we test learning of phonotactics and alternations with Cantonese native speakers, whose L1 provides no evidence for or against the link. We address learning of a vowel harmony pattern through the use of three artificial languages; one with a harmony pattern both within and across stems, another with a harmony pattern only across stems; and the other with a disharmony pattern within stems but harmony across stems. Learners successfully acquired harmony phonotactics according to input patterns, but they showed no difference in learning alternation patterns across the three languages. Our results suggest that the link between phonotactics and alternations might be language-specific: Only upon receiving L1 evidence, learners can use a unified mechanism to encode phonotactics and alternations.

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Unbalanced bilingual acquisition as a mechanism of grammatical change

Cited by 4 publications

References 14 publications

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

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

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

Evidence against a link between learning phonotactics and learning phonological alternations

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