Abstract
Bilingual children often experience difficulties with inflectional morphology. The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate how regularity of inflection in combination with verbal short-term and working memory (VSTM, VWM) influences bilingual children’s performance. Data from 231 typically developing five- to eight-year-old children were analyzed: Dutch monolingual children (N = 45), Frisian-Dutch bilingual children (N = 106), Turkish-Dutch bilingual children (N = 31), Tarifit-Dutch bilingual children (N = 38) and Arabic-Dutch bilingual children (N = 11). Inflection was measured with an expressive morphology task. VSTM and VWM were measured with a Forward and Backward Digit Span task, respectively. The results showed that, overall, children performed more accurately at regular than irregular forms, with the smallest gap between regulars and irregulars for monolinguals. Furthermore, this gap was smaller for older children and children who scored better on a non-verbal intelligence measure. In bilingual children, higher accuracy at using (irregular) inflection was predicted by a smaller cross-linguistic distance, a larger amount of Dutch at home, and a higher level of parental education. Finally, children with better VSTM, but not VWM, were more accurate at using regular and irregular inflection.
Highlights
Inflectional morphology is a locus of difficulty for bilingual children, but less is known about the role of regularity of inflection, and about the impact of verbal short-term and working memory on children’s accuracy at using regular versus irregular inflection
The current longitudinal study builds on these previous findings by investigating different bilingual groups, and asking how performance on regular and irregular noun plurals and past participles relates to child-internal resources such as verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory
We examined transfer effects in performance on Dutch noun plurals and past participles in the same Frisian-Dutch sample included in the current study by comparing accuracies on target forms that do and do not overlap between the two languages (Blom and Bosma 2016)
Summary
Inflectional morphology is a locus of difficulty for bilingual children, but less is known about the role of regularity of inflection, and about the impact of verbal short-term and working memory on children’s accuracy at using regular versus irregular inflection. Investigating these issues, the current study aimed to contribute to our understanding of how language-internal factors, child-internal factors, and their interactions determine language outcomes in bilingual children. The ways in which children’s environments provide exposure to two (or more) languages vary enormously.” This statement highlights the variation that exists within the bilingual population, which pertains to exposure and use (Francot et al 2020). Learning 2007) and Arabic, Tarifit and Turkish are the languages of two of the largest non-Western immigrant groups in the Netherlands (Den Ridder et al 2020)
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