Do bilingual children lag behind? A study of morphological encoding using ERPs.

Harald Clahsen,Anna Jessen

doi:10.1017/s0305000919000321

Harald Clahsen, Anna Jessen

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000919000321

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Abstract

The current study investigates how bilingual children encode and produce morphologically complex words. We employed a silent-production-plus-delayed-vocalization paradigm in which event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during silent encoding of inflected words which were subsequently cued to be overtly produced. The bilingual children's spoken responses and their ERPs were compared to previous datasets from monolingual children on the same task. We found an enhanced negativity for regular relative to irregular forms during silent production in both bilingual children's languages, replicating the ERP effect previously obtained from monolingual children. Nevertheless, the bilingual children produced more morphological errors (viz. over-regularizations) than monolingual children. We conclude that mechanisms of morphological encoding (as measured by ERPs) are parallel for bilingual and monolingual children, and that the increased over-regularization rates are due to their reduced exposure to each of the two languages (relative to monolingual children).

Highlights

Hoff et al (2012, p. 24), for example, noted that ‘[...] on average children acquiring two languages will lag behind children acquiring only one [...]’ Likewise, Bialystok (2009) pointed out that bilingual children in each of their languages and at all developmental levels lag behind their monolingual peers, which led to language proficiency firming as ‘the bad’ of bilingualism (Bialystok, 2009, p. 4) in her well-known triad (‘The good, the bad, and the indifferent’)
We found that the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) signature for morphological encoding that was previously obtained in monolingual children could be replicated for bilingual children
The present study investigated bilingual children’s production of morphologically complex words, processes involved in both morphological encoding/planning and the final spoken output

Summary

Introduction

Does bilingualism delay language acquisition in children? For some researchers, the answer to this question is a clear ‘Yes’. Hoff et al (2012, p. 24), for example, noted that ‘[...] on average children acquiring two languages will lag behind children acquiring only one [...]’ Likewise, Bialystok (2009) pointed out that bilingual children in each of their languages and at all developmental levels lag behind their monolingual peers, which led to language proficiency (as measured in terms of their vocabulary size) firming as ‘the bad’ of bilingualism (Bialystok, 2009, p. 4) in her well-known triad (‘The good, the bad, and the indifferent’). 956 Clahsen and Jessen each language compared to monolingual speakers, with higher error rates and longer production latencies, for example, in picture naming tasks; see Bialystok (2017) for a recent review This contrast has been attributed to a bilingual’s joint activation of two potentially competing linguistic expressions (one from each language) for naming the same target picture, causing less accurate and slower responses than in monolingual speakers (e.g., Luk, Green, Abutalebi, & Grady, 2012). It should be noted, that evidence for a bilingual delay/deficit comes almost exclusively from measures of LEXICAL SKILL, such as vocabulary size, speed and accuracy of object naming, and word/ non-word discrimination

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