Realization of English past tense by Chinese–English heritage bilingual children

This study investigates the cross-linguistic transfer of literacy skills in Spanish-English, Chinese-English bilingual, and English monolingual children (N=283, 5-10years). Research question 1 examines English literacy and asks how phonological and morpho-semantic skills contribute to word reading as a function of children's language background. Structural equation modeling revealed contrasting bilingual effects: compared to English monolinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals relied more on phonological awareness in word reading, whereas Chinese-English bilinguals relied more on lexical knowledge. Research question 2 examines relations between bilinguals' heritage language proficiency and English literacy. Results revealed direct and indirect effects of heritage language meta-linguistic skills on English word reading. The study yields implications for reading theories and instructional practices in optimizing literacy in linguistically diverse children.

Purpose: This study addresses the question of whether sequential bilingual children’s past tense marking development in their second language (L2) is affected by their knowledge of temporal marking in their first language (L1). We investigated whether Cantonese-English sequential bilingual children’s knowledge of aspect markers in Cantonese (L1), along with external and internal factors, predicts their past tense marking in English (L2). Method: We examined 39 pre-school children’s production of perfective aspect markers in Cantonese and regular and irregular past tense morphemes in English using a story-retell task administered in both languages. Result: The results showed that children produced significantly more irregular past tense verbs than regular past tense verbs in English. Their English irregular past tense use, but not regular past tense use, was predicted by their knowledge of aspect markers in Cantonese. Conclusion: Findings suggest that semantic transfer between Cantonese and English might contribute to the early stages of acquiring English past tense marking. Clinically, the results could potentially lead to more informed assessment procedures and better diagnostic decision making for bilingual children.

We investigated whether (1) 7–9-year-old children with SLI, bilingual children (BIL) and monolingual (TD) children differed on Dutch past tense production of real and pseudo-verbs and (2) whether non-word repetition (NWR), receptive vocabulary, and group status contributed to past tense production. Past tense patterned as SLI < BIL < TD, for NWR as SLI < BIL = TD and for vocabulary SLI = BIL < TD. Vocabulary and SLI group status were significant predictors of real-verb past tense inflection. SLI and bilingual group status were predictors of pseudo-verb past tense inflection. These findings confirm the association between vocabulary and past tense and the difficulty that children with SLI and bilingual children have with both skills.

While null objects are possible and pervasive in Chinese, their occurrence in languages like English and Spanish is rather restricted. In the case of developing grammars, the omission of categories that characterizes the initial stages of acquisition also affects the object category, together with inflection, subjects, determiners, etc. The main goal of this article is to investigate the nature of interlinguistic influence from Chinese into English in a set of Chinese-English (C-E) bilingual children with a focus on bilingual children’s early direct object (DO) realization in English and to provide new empirical evidence for the postulation that the development of the two languages is interdependent. In order to do so, a comparative study has been carried out: the English production of C-E bilinguals is analysed with regard to DOs and, in order to determine whether the possible overproduction of null DOs is due to influence from the other first language (L 1) (i.e. Chinese) or is rather part of the developmental process, a double comparison is established with English monolinguals (E monolinguals) and with Spanish-English bilinguals (S- E bilinguals). The results show that C-E bilinguals’ performance in terms of DO realization in English is significantly different from that of both E monolinguals and S-E bilinguals and that the latter two groups behave similarly. This finding supports the conclusion that, although null DOs occur in the initial stages of child language acquisition regardless of whether the adult grammar allows them (Chinese) or not (English and Spanish), in the case of C-E bilinguals’ English development, interlinguistic influence from Chinese into English has a negative effect as reflected in null DOs being produced at a higher rate and until later in life.

This study compared the use of English past tense in a group of Spanish–English bilingual children with language impairment (BLI) to younger groups of bilinguals with typical and atypical language development reported in an earlier study. Ten children with BLI enrolled in 3rd–6th grade participated. Children supplied 12 regular, 12 irregular, and 12 novel past tense verbs on an elicitation task. The results demonstrated that despite 2.5 years of school exposure, older children with BLI still lagged in the production of regular and novel past tense verbs when compared to the younger typically developing (TD) controls. Although the rates of productive errors on irregular verbs increased, the older students nonetheless failed to achieve rates of over-regularization comparable to the younger TD group. These data extend earlier findings regarding the exceptional challenge of past tense use, particularly with respect to finite verb morphology in certain children with BLI. These challenges, combined with similarities between monolingual and bilingual impairment, are largely compatible with a linguistic deficit account.

The purpose of this study is to examine changes in English past tense accuracy and errors among Spanish-English bilingual children with typical development (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD). Thirty-three children were tested before and after 1 year to examine changes in clinically relevant English past tense errors using an elicited production task. A mixed-model linear regression using age as a continuous variable revealed a robust effect for age. A 4-way repeated-measures analysis of variance was conducted with age (young, old) and language ability group (TD, DLD) as between-subjects variables, time (Time 1, Time 2) and verb type (regular, irregular, and novel verbs) as within-subject variables, and percent accuracy as the dependent variable. Subsequently, a 4-way repeated-measures analysis of variance was conducted to measure the overall distribution of verb errors across 2 time points. Overall, children produced regular and novel verb past tense forms with higher accuracy than irregular past tense verbs in an elicitation task. Children with TD were more accurate than children with DLD. Younger children made more improvement than older children from Time 1 to Time 2, especially in the regular and novel verb conditions. Bare stem and overregularization were the most common errors across all groups. Errors consisting of stem + ing were more common in children with DLD than those with TD in the novel verb condition. Contrary to an earlier report (Jacobson & Schwartz, 2005), the relative greater difficulty with regular and novel verbs was replaced by greater difficulty for irregular past tense, a pattern consistent with monolingual impairment. Age was a contributing factor, particularly for younger children with DLD who produced more stem + ing errors in the novel verb condition. For all children, and particularly for those with DLD, an extended period for irregular past tense learning was evident. The results support a usage-based theory of language acquisition and impairment.

Reviewed by: The bilingual child: Early development and language contact Jordana F. Garbati Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthew. 2007. The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. xxiii + 295. US $29.99 (softcover). Yip and Matthews' book outlines in great detail their systematic, longitudinal study of the development of Cantonese-English childhood bilingualism. This is one of the first accounts of bilingual development in young children (i.e., ages zero–three) involving a non-European language. The authors' investigation of the linguistic development of bilingual children includes a close examination of the language acquisition of their own three children. In this volume, Yip and Matthews present the theoretical underpinnings of their research, describe the contribution of their study to the field of bilingualism, discuss the methodological issues of their study, and report a range of findings. This book constitutes a new attempt at understanding the complexities of bilingualism. In their introductory chapter, Yip and Matthews highlight their personal involvement with this field of research and this specific study as well as their connection with the principal child learners discussed. They indentify their biases for conducting the study and situate it within the larger context of bilingualism research. In addition, the authors discuss grammaticalization, forms of cross-linguistic influence in monolingual and bilingual development, and the extent to which social context determines language input and outcome. The authors define key terms and clarify ambiguities in definitions (e.g., dominance versus proficiency, transfer versus influence), drawing on current research in the field. This introduction clearly lays out the aim of the book for the reader. The summaries at the end of this and every chapter review key points and terms, direct the reader's focus, and review the goals of the research. In Chapter 1, the authors identify the research questions of the study: (i) How does bilingual development differ from acquisition of the same two languages by monolingual children? (ii) Do the two languages develop independently or rather interact systematically? Is there evidence for transfer or cross-linguistic influence? What factors determine the direction of transfer? (iii) What do the linguistic features of bilingual children's development reveal about [End Page 567] general processes in language acquisition and language contact? (p. 6). The authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages associated with studying one's own children, as they do themselves in this volume. Yip and Matthews also review issues related to the language community, code-switching, second language acquisition strategies, and first language acquisition, topics of interest to educators and researchers interested in this field. They end this chapter with a discussion of language dominance, language contact phenomena, and language transfer. Chapter 2 is devoted to presenting the theoretical framework which informs the authors' research. In their detailed exploration of the literature, the authors draw on recent research to discuss problems of bilingual acquisition, to explore the interaction between grammatical systems in childhood bilingualism and to review theories on cross-linguistic influence, language dominance, and language contact. This theoretical overview is well thought out and the authors provide a clear connection between these theories and their research objectives. In Chapter 3, the authors describe their methodology in detail. After reviewing common methods in bilingualism research—case studies versus cross sectional experimental studies—they evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the methods used in their study. This includes discussion of how they implemented diary studies as one aspect of their data collection strategies and the benefits and drawbacks of incorporating this type of data. The authors highlight the rigorous methodological design of their study in which they used both longitudinal data from the Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus and the case studies of their own three children. Yip and Matthews clearly describe the main child participants, the language background of the children, and their linguistic experiences. In addition, they outline the children's language contact and developmental patterns over a two-and-a-half-year period and justify the coding. Once again, Yip and Matthews take the opportunity to acknowledge their possible methodological biases. In Chapters 4 through 8, the authors report the findings of their study. Here, they focus on the linguistic themes that arose...

This paper examines cross-linguistic influence in morphology among adult monolingual and heritage speakers (Arabic-English and Chinese-English). Participants performed a task requiring them to form past tenses for English nonce words. Arabic-English bilinguals produced significantly more vowel change past tenses than either English monolinguals or Chinese-English bilinguals. We attribute the preponderance of vowel change past tenses to cross-linguistic influence of Arabic, as vowel change is a dominant morphological property in Arabic but not in English or Chinese. These results support dynamic models of bilingualism with constantly active and interacting languages and contribute to the phenomenology of crosslinguistic interference.

The influence of one of a bilingual’s languages on the other is known as cross-linguistic influence (CLI). In grammatical gender acquisition, CLI can occur during gender discovery, assignment and agreement. The present study investigates CLI in Dutch as a heritage language, a language with a non-transparent gender system, in two groups of bilingual children. One (i.e., Dutch-German bilingual children) is acquiring languages with similar gender systems and the other (i.e., Dutch-French bilingual children) is acquiring languages with more distant gender systems. We found CLI in gender discovery, gender assignment and gender agreement for the Dutch-German group but not for the Dutch-French group. Moreover, CLI simultaneously facilitated and hindered gender acquisition within the children, depending on the gender congruency of the nouns. This suggests co-activation of grammatical gender values in bilingual children. The findings help us better understand when cross-linguistic influence takes place and how it affects acquisition in bilingual children.

An ERP study of regular and irregular English past tense inflection

RULES AND SCHEMAS IN THE DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF THE ENGLISH PAST TENSE Joan L. BybeeDan I. Slobin State University of New York,University of California, BuffaloBerkeley Consistent error patterns in English past-tense forms are reported for three age groups: preschoolers, 8-10-year-olds, and adults. It is argued that, although irregular forms are rote-learned, speakers make generalizations about such forms. Such a generalization is defined as a schema which describes general phonological properties of a morphological class, and is used in organizing and accessing the lexicon. Schemas for the English past tense develop and change with age, yielding implications for both acquisitional and diachronic theory.* 1. English verbal morphology is rather restricted, compared to that of a fullfledged inflectional language, since it offers only four inflectional morphemes: the 3rd singular present, the past tense, the past participle, and the progressive. Thus it provides no opportunity to study the complex interaction between intersecting inflectional categories within a paradigm, such as person, number, mood, and tense. It does, however, provide the opportunity for a study of a different sort: although English has a demonstrably productive process of suffixation for past-tense formation, in the form of -ed, it also has many irregular verbs whose past tense is formed in some cases without suffixation, and in others with changes of vowel (or, less commonly, consonant) in the stem. These irregular verbs are relatively few in number. Bloch 1947 identifies about 200 (several of which are archaic), but thousands of verbs form their past tense by adding an allomorph of -ed. Although irregular verbs are relatively insignificant as to type frequency, the picture is quite different when token frequency is considered: these are among the most frequent verbs of the language . Of the 30 most frequent past-tense forms (Kucera & Francis 1967), 22 are irregular. The situation changes radically in the second 30 most frequent past-tense forms, where 8 are irregular. From the child learner's point of view, irregular verbs are also prominent: Slobin 1971 finds that, in 49 hours of adult speech to Roger Brown's subject Eve, between the ages of 18 and 26 months, irregular past-tense forms account for 292 of the past-tense tokens, while regular verbs comprise only 99. Thus irregular past-tense forms constitute an important core of English verbal morphology. * A number of people contributed to the research reported here, and we would like to thank them for their help. Susan Ervin-Tripp, Roger Brown, and Zell Greenberg made their spontaneous speech data available to us; Zell Greenberg tested the preschool children and analysed the results; Amy Strage and Ann Eisenberg tested the adults; Mr. B. Harris and his third-grade class at Cornell Elementary School, Albany, CA, played the 'verb game' with us; Tanya Renner, Carol Lynn Moder, and BongHee Choi helped with the statistics; and Brody Hooper let us use his verb forms and his friends. While this research was being conducted, loan Bybee held a Postdoctoral Research Training Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. This research was also supported by the University of California Committee on Research and the Institute of Human Learning, University of California, Berkeley. 265 266LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 2 (1982) The difficulty presented by these irregular verbs, both for the learner and for the linguist, is that so many different irregularities occur. Though most irregulars are characterized by a vowel change, a number of different changes occur, e.g. stick/stuck, sing/sang, keep/kept, grow/grew. In addition, some verbs add a t or d; and some have consonant changes as well, e.g. makelmade. Jespersen 1942 lists ten classes of irregular past-tense formations, and dozens of sub-classes, while Bloch comes up with twenty conjugation types. Such variety increases the difficulty of the learning task, but at the same time provides us with an opportunity to investigate the interaction of rule and rote-learning in morphology. It is clear that some rote-learning is necessary in acquiring irregular past-tense forms: the pair go/went could not be learned in any other way. What is not so clear is whether speakers must learn all irregulars by rote, or whether...

Difficulty with marking past tense verbs is a clinical indicator of language disorders. However, there is too little information on language development in bilingual children living in multilingual and multicultural countries like Singapore to accurately diagnose language disorders. In this study, we aimed to understand language development in Singaporean English-Mandarin bilingual children by examining narrative-level discourse. We conducted secondary analysis of a large data set collected in Singapore. Here, we report on a total of 36 English-dominant and balanced English-Mandarin bilingual participants who produced narratives in English and Mandarin elicited via retell tasks using wordless picture books. Participants had been allocated to language dominance groups based on parental reports and performance on vocabulary tasks. We explored their productions of English regular and irregular past tense verb forms and Mandarin perfective aspect markers and examined the effect of language dominance on production of target forms. There was no significant difference between the language dominance groups on any outcome measures. Participants produced significantly more irregular past tense verb forms than regular past tense markers in English. The percentage accuracy of regular and irregular past tense verb forms was positively correlated with English expressive vocabulary scores. There was no significant correlation between Mandarin perfective aspect markers and Mandarin vocabulary scores. These findings suggest that acquisition of past tense marking in bilingual children is dependent on exposure to target verb forms. By providing normative data, these results can support clinical decision making around assessment and diagnosis of language disorders in linguistically complex communities in which there are limited standardized assessment tools normed on relevant populations.

The processes involved in past tense verb generation have been central to models of inflectional morphology. However, the empirical support for such models has often been based on studies of accuracy in past tense verb formation on a relatively small set of items. We present the first large-scale study of past tense inflection (the Past Tense Inflection Project, or PTIP) that affords response time, accuracy, and error analyses in the generation of the past tense form from the present tense form for over 2,000 verbs. In addition to standard lexical variables (such as word frequency, length, and orthographic and phonological neighborhood), we have also developed new measures of past tense neighborhood consistency and verb imageability for these stimuli, and via regression analyses we demonstrate the utility of these new measures in predicting past tense verb generation. The PTIP can be used to further evaluate existing models, to provide well controlled stimuli for new studies, and to uncover novel theoretical principles in past tense morphology.

The influence of semantics on past-tense inflection Michael Ramscar (michael@cogsci.ed.ac.uk) University of Edinburgh, 2 Buccleuch Place Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, Scotland. Abstract Semantics and past-tense inflection Previous theories of past-tense verb inflection have considered phonological and grammatical information to be the only relevant factors in the inflection process (e.g. Bybee & Moder, 1983; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986; Kim, Pinker, Prince & Prasada, 1991). This paper presents three experiments that show that semantic information plays a decisive role in determining the inflection of both existing and novel homophone verb stems. These findings indicate that regular and irregular inflections are determined by semantic and phonological similarities in memory, and furthermore that people are not responsive to the kind of grammatical distinctions amongst verb roots that default rule theories of inflection (Pinker, 1999) presuppose. Introduction In most theories -- and studies -- of past-tense verb inflection, phonological and grammatical information have been considered to be the two relevant factors in the inflection process (e.g. Bybee & Moder, 1983; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986; Kim, Pinker, Prince & Prasada, 1991; Pinker, 1991; 1999). However, in some models of inflectional processing (MacWhinney & Leinbach, 1991; Joanisse & Seidenberg, 1999), semantic processes have been included to help explain the processing of homophone verbs (e.g. brake/break). Since brake and break both sound the same, phonology alone cannot distinguish which of broke or braked is to be the correct past tense form for the input bre I k . Although using semantic information to guide this process appears intuitively plausible, it has not been supported empirically, and indeed this suggestion has been fiercely criticised by Pinker and colleagues (Kim et al, 1991; Pinker, 1999), who put forward an alternative, natavist account of homophone inflection (Pinker, 1991; 1999). This predicts that the regularisation of irregular sounding verb stems is driven by innate grammatical sensitivity: verbs that are instinctively perceived to be denominal will be automatically regularised. This account is supported by results reported by Kim et al (1991) which indicate that grammatical factors correlate better than semantic factors with people's ratings of the acceptability of past tense forms in context, although these results do not rule out any semantic role in inflection. So do semantics have any influence on the past tense forms speakers produce? This paper seeks to clarify and directly address this question. To initially test whether semantic similarity can affect the inflection of verb past tenses, Experiment 1 examines the past tense forms native English speakers produce for novel (nonce) English verbs whilst holding phonological factors constant and varying the semantic contexts in which the verbs are presented. The phonologically similar nonces sprink and frink are presented in contexts that primed either the existing phonologically similar regular forms blink or wink, or the existing phonologically similar irregular form drink. It is hypothesized that if semantic similarity played a part in the inflection process, then there will be significant differences between the proportion of regular and irregular forms produced, in line with whether the semantic context favored an existing regular or irregular verb. Experiment 1 Participants. Participants were 120 visitors a shopping mall in Edinburgh, Scotland, and 40 students at the University of Edinburgh. All were native English speakers and participated voluntarily in the study Materials. A set of cards were printed with a paragraph that contained a highlighted nonce verb (sprink or frink) in a context in which the nonce was in its infinitive tense, and a blank that later required its past tense. Two of the contexts were further manipulated so that they primed either two existing regular verbs -- blink and wink -- that are phonologically similar to the nonces, or an existing irregular verb -- drink -- that is phonologically similar to the nonces. The contexts constructed are shown in Table 1: in the drink context, the nonce was shown in a context that used it as a verb to describe the consumption of vodka and fish, whereas in the blink and wink context the nonce was shown in a context that used it as a verb to describe a symptomatic affliction of the eye-lid associated with a fictitious disease. A third context was designed to semantically prime neither drink nor blink or wink (instead the nonce was used as a verb describing a hypnotic trance and was semantically similar to the regular verb meditate; see Table 1), whilst a control presented the nonce in a context that provided few semantic clues ( John likes to frink. Last week he In order to control the phonological properties of the nonces in the semantic contexts, both the initial presentation of the nonce, and the blank which was used to elicit the past tense form from participants were embedded in the same sentence substructure in each of the three

A proposal for a formal model, Fragment Grammars, that treats productivity and reuse as the target of inference in a probabilistic framework. Language allows us to express and comprehend an unbounded number of thoughts. This fundamental and much-celebrated property is made possible by a division of labor between a large inventory of stored items (e.g., affixes, words, idioms) and a computational system that productively combines these stored units on the fly to create a potentially unlimited array of new expressions. A language learner must discover a language's productive, reusable units and determine which computational processes can give rise to new expressions. But how does the learner differentiate between the reusable, generalizable units (for example, the affix -ness, as in coolness, orderliness, cheapness) and apparent units that do not actually generalize in practice (for example, -th, as in warmth but not coolth)? In this book, Timothy O'Donnell proposes a formal computational model, Fragment Grammars, to answer these questions. This model treats productivity and reuse as the target of inference in a probabilistic framework, asking how an optimal agent can make use of the distribution of forms in the linguistic input to learn the distribution of productive word-formation processes and reusable units in a given language. O'Donnell compares this model to a number of other theoretical and mathematical models, applying them to the English past tense and English derivational morphology, and showing that Fragment Grammars unifies a number of superficially distinct empirical phenomena in these domains and justifies certain seemingly ad hoc assumptions in earlier theories.