Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-jbjwg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-07T22:47:26.427Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Do early successive bilinguals show the English L2 pattern of precocious BE acquisition?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2015

JOHANNE PARADIS*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
ELMA BLOM
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
*
Address for correspondence: Professor Johanne Paradis, Department of Linguistics, 4–57 Assiniboia Hall, University of Alberta, Edmonton, ABCanada, T6G 2E7johanne.paradis@ualberta.ca

Abstract

This study investigated the role of age-of-acquisition in determining whether young bilingual children show a pattern of L2/nonnative English, precocious BE acquisition, or whether they show the L1/native English pattern of synchronous acquisition of BE and inflectional morphology. Two groups of children with age-of-acquisition before or after 4;0 and equivalent exposure to L2 English were given production and grammaticality-judgement tasks. The children in both age-of-acquisition groups showed the precocious BE pattern, regardless of L1 background and on both tasks. We conclude that, for this aspect of morphosyntax, bilingual children who begin to learn English after age 3;0 are best characterized as child L2 rather than bilingual L1 learners.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We would like to thank the following research assistants for their help in collecting and processing the data: Kyla Coole, Kristyn Emmerzael, Ruiting Jia, Katryna Lysay, Dorothy Pinto, Tamara Sorenson Duncan, Emily Yiu, and Tatiana Zdorenko. We would also like to thank the Multicultural Health Brokers Cooperative and the Edmonton Public School Board for assistance in recruitment. This research was supported with funds from the following agencies: The Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network (Award #27061500 to Paradis), the Alberta Centre for Child, Family and Community Research (Award #090415INV to Paradis) and Alberta Innovates Health Solutions (Health Scholar Award to Paradis).

References

Bateson, M. C. (1967). Arabic language handbook. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Bhatia, T. K. (1993). Punjabi: A cognitive-descriptive grammar. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Blom, E., Paradis, J., & Sorenson Duncan, T. (2012). Effects of input properties, vocabulary size and L1 on the development of third person singular –s in child L2 English. Language Learning, 62, 965994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brace, N., Kemp, R., & Snelgar, R. (2009). SPSS for psychologists (4th Edition). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chilla, S. (2008). Erstsprache, Zweitsprache, Spezifische Sprachentwicklungsstӧrung? Eine Untersuchung des Erwerbs der deutschen Hauptsatzstruktur durch sukzessiv-bilinguale Kinder mit türkischer Erstsprache [First language, second language, Specific Language Impairment? A study of the acquisition of German main clauses by sequential bilingual children with Turkish as the first language]. Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovač.Google Scholar
Dehghani, Y. (2002). Persian. Munich: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
De Houwer, A. (1995). Bilingual language acquisition. In Fletcher, P. and MacWhinney, B. (Eds.), The handbook of child language (pp. 219250). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
De Houwer, A. (2009). Bilingual first language acquisition. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
De Villiers, J., & de Villiers, P. (1973). A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2, 267278.Google Scholar
Dulay, H., & Burt, M. (1974). Natural sequences in child second language acquisition. Language Learning, 24, 3753.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M., & Hoff, E. (2007). Input and the acquisition of language: Three questions. In Hoff, E. & Shatz, M. (eds.), The handbook of language development, pp. 107127. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Genesee, F., & Nicoladis, E. (2007). Bilingual first language acquisition. In Hoff, E. & Shatz, M. (eds.), Blackwell handbook of language development, pp. 324342. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Granfeldt, J., & Schlyter, S. (2004). Cliticisation in the acquisition of French as L1 and L2. In Prévost, P. & Paradis, J. (eds.), The acquisition of French in different contexts: Focus on functional categories, pp. 333370. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Granfeldt, J., Schlyter, S., & Kihlstedt, M. (2007). French as cL2, 2L1 and L1 in pre-school children. In Granfeldt, J. (ed.), Studies in Romance Bilingual Acquisition – Age of Onset and Development of French and Spanish, pp. 7–42. (Petites études de l’Institut d’études romanes de Lund, 24. [Small studies of the Lund Romance Studies Institute, 24]) Sweden: University of Lund.Google Scholar
Haznedar, B. (2001). The acquisition of the IP system in child L2 English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ionin, T., & Wexler, K. (2002). Why is “is” easier than “s”? Acquisition of tense/agreement morphology by child L2-English learners. Second Language Research, 18, 95136.Google Scholar
Jia, G., & Fuse, A. (2007). Acquisition of English grammatical morphology by native Mandarin-speaking children and adolescents: Age-related differences. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 12801299.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kachru, Y. (2006). Hindi. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Lakshmanan, U. (1994). Universal grammar in child second language acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Lin, H. (2001). A grammar of Mandarin Chinese. Muenchen: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
Mackenzie, I. (2001). A linguistic introduction to Spanish. Muenchen: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
Matthews, S., & Yip, V. (1994). Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
McLaughlin, B. (1978). Second language acquisition in childhood. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (1990). Grammatical development in the simultaneous acquisition of two first languages. In Meisel, J.M. (ed.), Two first languages - Early grammatical development in bilingual children, pp. 520. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (2001). The simultaneous acquisition of two first languages: Early differentiation and subsequent development of grammars. In Cenoz, J. & Genesee, F. (eds.), Trends in bilingual acquisition, pp. 1141. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (2008). Child second language acquisition or successive first language acquisition? In Gavruseva, E. & Haznedar, B. (eds.), Current trends in child second language acquisition: A generative perspective, pp. 5580. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (2009). Second language acquisition in early childhood. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 28, 534.Google Scholar
Nguyen, D. H. (1997). Vietnamese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pallant, J. (2010). SPSS survival manual (4th Edition). New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2005). Grammatical morphology in children learning English as a second language: Implications of similarities with Specific Language Impairment. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in the Schools, 36, 172187.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2008). Tense as a clinical marker in English L2 acquisition with language delay/impairment. In Gavruseva, E. & Haznedar, B. (eds.), Current trends in child second language acquisition: A generative perspective, pp. 337356. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2010). The interface between bilingual development and specific language impairment: Keynote article. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31, 328.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2011). Individual differences in child English second language acquisition: Comparing child-internal and child-external factors. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 213237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J., & Genesee, F. (1996). Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: autonomous or interdependent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 125.Google Scholar
Paradis, J., & Genesee, F. (1997). On continuity and the emergence of functional categories in bilingual first language acquisition. Language Acquisition, 6, 91124.Google Scholar
Paradis, J., Genesee, F., & Crago, M. (2011). Dual language development and disorders: A handbook on bilingualism and second language learning (2nd Edition). Baltimore, MD: Brookes.Google Scholar
Paradis, J., Rice, M., Crago, M., & Marquis, J. (2008). The acquisition of tense in English: Distinguishing child L2 from L1 and SLI. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 134.Google Scholar
Pierce, L., Genesee, F., & Paradis, J. (2013). Acquisition of English Grammatical Morphology by Internationally-Adopted Children from China. Journal of Child Language, 40, 10761090.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rice, M. L., & Wexler, K. (2001). Test of early grammatical impairment. New York, NY: The Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar
Rice, M. L., Wexler, K., & Redmond, S. (1999). Grammaticality judgments of an extended optional infinitive grammar: Evidence from English-speaking children with SLI. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 42, 943961.Google Scholar
Schmidt, R. L. (1999). Urdu: An essential grammar. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schwartz, B. D. (2004). Why child L2 acquisition? In J. Van Kampen & S. Baauw (eds.), Proceedings of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 2003 (Vol. 1). Utrecht, The Netherlands: LOT Occasional Series.Google Scholar
Sorenson Duncan, T., & Paradis, J. (2013). English second language learners’ nonword repetition performance: The influence of vocabulary size, length of L2 exposure, and L1 background. Poster presented at the Symposium for Research on Child Language Disorders, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S. (2013). Assessing age of onset effects in (early) child L2 acquisition. Language Acquisition, 20, 7492.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S., Argyri, F., Cornips, L., Hulk, A.C.J., Sorace, A., & Tsimpli, I. (2014). On the role of age of onset and input in early child bilingualism in Greek and Dutch. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35, 765805.Google Scholar
Zobl, H., & Liceras, J. (1994). Functional categories and acquisition orders. Language Learning, 44, 159180.Google Scholar