Abstract
According to usage-based theories, children initially acquire surface-level constructions and then abstract representations. If so, bilingual children might show lags relative to monolingual children early in acquisition, but not later on, once they rely on abstract representations. We tested this prediction with comprehension of passives in 3- to 6-year-old children: French–English bilinguals and English monolinguals. As predicted, younger bilingual children tended to be less accurate than monolingual children. In contrast, the older bilingual children scored equivalently to monolinguals, despite less exposure to English. When the children made errors, the bilingual children were more likely to interpret the subject as the agent of the action than the monolingual children. These results are consistent with the argument that children develop increasingly abstract representations of linguistic constructions with usage. They further suggest that bilingual children might catch up with monolingual through use of selective attention and/or a semantic bias.
Highlights
According to usage-based accounts of language acquisition (Tomasello, 2000, 2003; Bybee, 2010), children first learn surface forms of language before generalizing to more abstract forms of representation
As there may be other reasons for children’s errors, the present study focused on a linguistic construction for which cross-linguistic influence would increase children’s accuracy
On a 2 × 2 (Age Group × Language Group) ANOVA on the raw scores of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test III (PPVT), the younger children scored 16.34 lower than the older children, F(1,115) = 15.85, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.121 (95%CI of this difference [8.17, 24.36])
Summary
According to usage-based accounts of language acquisition (Tomasello, 2000, 2003; Bybee, 2010), children first learn surface forms of language (i.e., as presented in the input) before generalizing to more abstract forms of representation. Usage-based accounts would predict that bilinguals should lag in language acquisition relative to monolinguals. Even for monolinguals, frequency plays an important role in Abstraction of Passives the acquisition of vocabulary (Goodman et al, 2008) and morphology (Marchman, 1997), so it is not surprising to see lags among bilinguals in these domains
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