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Profiling sequential bilingual children using off-line and on-line comprehension and production tasks: do they pattern similarly to L1 children, L2 adults, or children with Specific Language Impairment?

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Theodoros Marinis, University of Reading


A recent debate in child second language (L2) acquisition research surrounds whether or not language development in L2 children resembles monolingual child (L1) acquisition or adult L2 acquisition (Schwartz, 2004; Weerman, Bisschop, & Punt, 2006). Some studies have shown that at the domain of inflectional morphology L2 children follow similar development to L1 children (Weerman, Bisschop, & Punt, 2006), whereas at the domain of syntax, at an early stage of development they transfer properties from their L1 to their L2 (Haznedar, 1997). However, other studies have shown less clear-cut findings with L2 children performing similarly to L2 adults in inflectional morphology (Chondrogianni, 2008), others showing similarities between all three groups in the domain of syntax (Unsworth, 2005), and others showing differences between L2 children and L2 adults in both inflectional morphology and syntax (Blom, 2008). The debate is still on and it seems that several external (as age of onset, years of exposure, proficiency in the L2 and the L1, quantity and quality of input) and internal (properties of the L1 and the L2) factors affect the findings of the studies above and may cause the different patterns attested.

A second line of research has compared the language abilities of L2 children with children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (Paradis, 2008). However, with very few exceptions (e.g., Marinis & Chondrogianni (2010; in press), this line of research has focused on production tasks with children that had less than two years of exposure to the L2. To date only three studies tested off-line (Grüter, 2005) and on-line comprehension (Marinis, 2007, 2008) and showed that L2 children pattern more similarly to L1 children than to children with SLI and differences between L2 and L1 children could be attributed to transfer of representations of their L1 to their L2.

In my presentation I will addresses both these lines of research by presenting: 1) data from standardised language and memory assessments, and 2) off-line and on-line comprehension and production tasks.

References

  • Blom, E. (2008). Testing the Domain-by-Age Model: Inflection and Placement of Dutch Verbs. In B. B. Haznedar & E. Gavruseva (Eds.), Current trends in child second language acquisition: a generative perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
  • Chondrogianni, V. (2008). The acquisition of determiners and clitic pronouns by child and adult L2 learners of Greek. PhD Dissertation: University of Cambridge.
  • Grüter, T. (2005). Comprehension and production of French object clitics by child L2 learners and children with SLI. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26, 363-391.
  • Haznedar, B. (1997). L2 acquisition by a Turkish-speaking child: evidence of L1 influence. In E. Hughes, M. Hughes & A. Greenhill (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Marinis, T. (2007). On-line processing of passives in L1 and L2 children. In A. Belikova, L. Meroni & M. Umeda (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA) (pp. 265-276). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
  • Marinis, T. (2008). On-line processing of sentences involving reflexive and non-reflexive pronouns in L1 and L2 children. In A. Gavarró Algueró & M. J. Freitas (Eds.), Language acquisition and development. Proceedings of GALA 2007. (pp. 348-358). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
  • Marinis, T. & Chondrogianni, V. (2010). Production of tense marking in successive bilingual children: when do they converge with their monolingual peers? International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 12, 19-28.
  • Marinis, T. & Chondrogianni, V. (in press). Comprehension of reflexives and pronouns in sequential bilingual children: do they pattern similarly to L1 children, L2 adults, or children with Specific Language Impairment? Journal of Neurolinguistics.
  • Paradis, J. (2008). Tense as a clinical marker in English L2 acquisition with language delay/impairment. In E. Gavruseva & B. Haznedar (Eds.), Current trends in child second language acquisition: a generative perspective (pp. 337-356). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Schwartz, B. D. (2004). On child L2 development of syntax and morphology. Lingue e linguaggio, 1, 97-132.
  • Unsworth, S. (2005). Child L2, adult L2, child L1: differences and similarities. Unpublished PhD, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht.
  • Weerman, F., Bisschop, J., & Punt, L. (2006). L1 and L2 acquisition of Dutch adjectival inflection. ACLC Working Papers, 1, 5-36.

Published: Tuesday, October 1, 2013