Morphosyntactic Development in First Generation Arabic—English Children: The Effect of Cognitive, Age, and Input Factors over Time and across Languages

Johanne Paradis,Alexandra Gottardo,Xi Chen,Adriana Soto-Corominas,Evangelia Daskalaki

doi:10.3390/languages6010051

Abstract

This longitudinal study examined morphosyntactic development in the heritage Arabic-L1 and English-L2 of first-generation Syrian refugee children (mean age = 9.5; range = 6–13) within their first three years in Canada. Morphosyntactic abilities were measured using sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) in English and Syrian Arabic that included diverse morphosyntactic structures. Direct measures of verbal and non-verbal cognitive skills were obtained, and a parent questionnaire provided the age at L2 acquisition onset (AOA) and input variables. We found the following: Dominance in the L1 was evident at both time periods, regardless of AOA, and growth in bilingual abilities was found over time. Cognitive skills accounted for substantial variance in SRT scores in both languages and at both times. An older AOA was associated with superior SRT scores at Time−1 for both languages, but at Time-2, older AOA only contributed to superior SRT scores in Arabic. Using the L2 with siblings gave a boost to English at Time−1 but had a negative effect on Arabic at Time-2. We conclude that first-generation children show strong heritage-L1 maintenance early on, and individual differences in cognitive skills have stable effects on morphosyntax in both languages over time, but age and input factors have differential effects on each language and over time.

Highlights

Much recent research has focused on the unique morphosyntactic properties of languages when they are acquired as a first language (L1) in a heritage context by bilingual children, who typically become dominant in the societal language, their second language (L2)
This study suggests that rapid heritage-L1 attrition and dominant language shift to the L2 is not evident in morphosyntax in the first 3 years for first-generation child migrants
Even though dominance in the L2 is generally expected for heritage-L1 children by adulthood, these first-generation children might have a good chance of strong heritage language maintenance in the long term

Summary

Introduction

Much recent research has focused on the unique morphosyntactic properties of languages when they are acquired as a first language (L1) in a heritage context by bilingual children, who typically become dominant in the societal language, their second language (L2). Few studies have tracked the morphosyntactic development in both languages of heritage-L1, English-L2 bilingual children using a longitudinal design. Those studies that have done so have mainly focused on simultaneous bilinguals during the preschool years (e.g., Hoff et al 2012; Hoff and Ribot 2017; Silva-Corvalán 2014; Yip and Matthews 2007). Retrospective studies with adults show that a shift in dominance to the L2 is the norm for child bilinguals from minority backgrounds in North America (e.g., Carreira and Kagan 2011; Montrul 2016), but the age when this commonly occurs and the impact on heritage-L1 maintenance is not yet well documented through prospective, longitudinal research. Examining the prospective development of the heritage-L1 and L2 over time in first-generation children would contribute further to our knowledge of dominant language shift

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