Responses to Cantonese A-not-A questions by Cantonese-English bilingual children

Previous studies suggest that language dominance and input ambiguity are the two major determinants of crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition. This article reports a case of bi-directional crosslinguistic transfer in the acquisition of dative constructions by Cantonese—English bilingual children. Longitudinal data of five bilingual children reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between bilingual and monolingual children in the development of English prepositional datives and Cantonese inverted double object datives. Individual differences among the five bilingual children largely correspond to their language dominance patterns, and input ambiguity also helps to explain some transfer effects. It is found that crosslinguistic influence is most likely to take place at vulnerable domains in language acquisition, and a great deal of the interaction between the two languages is observed in such domains. The findings suggest that crosslinguistic influence is pervasive in both directions of bilingual acquisition.

This corpus-based study demonstrates a case of bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of right-dislocation by Cantonese–English bilingual children and interprets the results in relation to Hulk and Müller’s hypothesis for cross-linguistic influence. Longitudinal data reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between bilingual and monolingual children in the development of right-dislocation in English and Cantonese. While right-dislocation lies at the syntax–pragmatics interface, both delay and acceleration are observed in bilingual development. The article’s findings in general support Hulk and Müller’s hypothesis for cross-linguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition, but the bidirectional influence observed is not predicted by their formulation of the hypothesis. Moreover, the results suggest that language dominance may influence the directionality of cross-linguistic influence.

The purpose of this study was to compare the novel word learning skills between Cantonese-English bilingual children at risk for developmental language disorder (DLD) and their typically developing (TD) peers. Participants were 24 Cantonese-English bilingual preschool children at risk for DLD and 38 TD children. Each participant was presented with eight novel words in Cantonese (first language [L1]) and eight in English (second language [L2]) over eight weekly sessions. Children's existing lexical knowledge was measured using the moving-average number of different words in language samples in L1 and L2. Bilingual children at risk for DLD were scored lower than their TD peers for both languages over time. The role of lexical knowledge in children's word learning differed between the TD and DLD groups: Lexical knowledge in L1 was a predictor of L1 word learning in TD children, while lexical knowledge in L2 predicted L2 word learning in children at risk for DLD. In addition, significant cross-linguistic effects were found from L2 to L1 for both groups. This study underscores the complexity of novel word learning in bilingual children at risk for DLD. Clinically, these findings suggest the value of tracking learning trajectories in bilingual children across both languages.

This study investigates the acquisition of speech rhythm by Cantonese–English bilingual children and their age-matched monolingual peers. Languages can be classified in terms of rhythmic characteristics that define English as stress-timed and Cantonese as syllable-timed. Few studies have examined the concurrent acquisition of rhythmically different languages in bilingual children. This study uses data of six Cantonese–English bilingual children around age 3;0 and compares them with six monolingual children in each language using recently developed acoustic rhythmic metrics on consonantal, vocalic and syllabic intervals. Qualitative data on syllable structure complexity and vowel quality are also included. Results on syllable duration show that monolingual children display distinct rhythmic patterns while the differences between the two languages of the bilingual children are less distinct. Bilingual English has less durational variability than monolingual English. Bilingual children have a distinct phonological developmental trajectory from monolingual children, which is manifested in acquisition delay and is influenced by language dominance. This shows that the two phonologies interact at the prosodic level.

The current study investigated the role of cross-linguistic influence in Cantonese–English bilingual children's comprehension of subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (RCs). Twenty simultaneous Cantonese–English bilingual children (Mage= 8;11, SD = 2;6) and 20 vocabulary-matched Cantonese monolingual children (Mage= 6;4, SD = 1;3) completed a test of Cantonese RC comprehension. The bilingual children also completed a test of English RC comprehension. The results showed that, whereas the monolingual children were equally competent on subject and object RCs, the bilingual children performed significantly better on subject RCs. Error analyses suggested that the bilingual children were most often correctly assigning thematic roles in object RCs, but were incorrectly choosing the RC subject as the head referent. This pervasive error was interpreted to be due to the fact that both Cantonese and English have canonical SVO word order, which creates competition with structures that compete with an object RC analysis.

Introduction: Research in recent years has explored the vocabulary size (lexical breadth) of bilingual children, but less is known about the richness of bilingual word knowledge (lexical depth), and about how knowledge of words in the two languages interact. This study explores how bilingual narrative intervention with vocabulary instruction in each language may modulate crosslinguistic influence (CLI) between the languages of bilingual kindergarten children, focusing on CLI of lexical knowledge, and which factors modulate performance.Methods: Forty-one typically developing English-Hebrew bilingual children (M = 64.63 months) participated. A bilingual adaptation of Story Champs narrative intervention program (Spencer and Petersen, 2012) was used to deliver vocabulary instruction in separate blocks of home language (HL) and school language (SL) sessions. Different intervention words were targeted in each language, but the children were tested on all target words in both languages. Lexical knowledge was assessed with a definition task four times throughout the study: prior to intervention, after each intervention block, and 4–6 weeks later. Learner characteristics (chronological age, age of onset of bilingualism and length of exposure) and proficiency in each language (standardized tests, familiarity with the vocabulary introduced in the intervention at baseline) were examined as possible modulators of performance.Results: Children showed growth in lexical breadth and depth in their HL/English after HL intervention and in lexical breadth in the SL/Hebrew following SL intervention, with CLI for semantic depth observed via a qualitative analysis, but not quantitatively. Better HL/English performance was correlated with later AoB (and shorter SL exposure) and higher HL language proficiency scores. Children with higher HL/English proficiency responded better to the SL/Hebrew intervention, gaining more than those with lower English proficiency. Children with SL/Hebrew vocabulary dominance at the outset of the study also gained more from the HL/English intervention. No correlations were found between learner characteristics and SL performance.Discussion: The current study indicates that bilingual narrative intervention with vocabulary instruction may be efficacious for improving the lexical breadth and depth of bilingual kindergarten children. It suggests that CLI may enhance bilingual children’s language learning success, and points to the importance of strengthening both languages of bilingual children.

This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with different verb types in controlled discourse contexts in 68 three- to seven-year-old sequential Cantonese–English bilingual children. The results show the bilingual children behaved similarly to the Cantonese monolingual peers in object omission, but exhibited protracted development and produced target-deviant forms following a Cantonese pattern in omitting objects specified in prior discourse in English. The bilingual children also showed non-target-like uses of the Cantonese post-verbal object pronounkeoi5,which were unattested in monolingual children. Our findings show evidence for bidirectional cross-linguistic influence: the direction of influence goes from the weaker to the stronger language and from the stronger to the weaker language. Vulnerability of object realization in bilingual acquisition can be better understood in terms of the interaction between cross-linguistic influence, input (e.g., quantity and structural frequencies) and other linguistic elements involved in the interface relation (e.g., verb type).

This corpus-based study investigates intonation patterns in the production of Cantonese by Cantonese-English bilingual children. We examine the intonation patterns in eight simultaneous bilingual children acquiring a tonal (Cantonese) and an intonational language (English) from 2;0 to 3;0. Two intonation patterns are observed in all the bilingual children studied: high pitch followed by a fall (including H_H*L% and H_L*L%) and low pitch followed by a rise (including L_H*H% and L_L*H%), in which English-like intonation is applied to Cantonese and code-mixed utterances. They illustrate cross-linguistic influence in prosody from English in the bilingual children’s early phonological development. Language dominance, use of sentence-final particles, and the children’s grammatical complexity are found to be significant predictors for the production of bilingual intonation. First, the more dominant the child is in Cantonese, the less bilingual intonation is produced in Cantonese and code-mixed utterances. Second, bilingual intonation is significantly more likely to be produced in utterances with sentence-final particles than without. Third, the greater the child’s grammatical complexity, the lower the predicted probability of producing bilingual intonation.

This study investigates the acquisition of the third person pronoun keoi5 佢 with inanimate referents in post-verbal position (henceforth, KEOI) in Hong Kong Cantonese. Following a linguistic analysis of KEOI vis-à-vis its equivalents it in English and tā 它 in Mandarin Chinese, we conducted a corpus-based study on the use of KEOI in 9 Cantonese-English bilingual children (1;03–4;06) and 3 Cantonese monolingual children (1;10–2;09) in naturalistic settings. Results show that Cantonese-speaking children mainly used KEOI as a canonical object of verbal predicates expressing irrealis bounded disposal events, indicating their early sensitivity to the aspectual properties of KEOI-clauses. While monolingual children were consistently adult-like in using KEOI, bilingual children produced unbounded KEOI-clauses unattested in their monolingual peers and the adults. They also used higher rates of realis KEOI-clauses and demonstrated interchangeable use between KEOI and it in code-mixed utterances. Our findings lend support to the proposal that KEOI marks bounded disposals with irrealis results or states. Input and language experience are shown to influence the acquisition of KEOI-clauses, with cross-linguistic influence of English likely induced by the interplay among ambiguity of input in Cantonese, extensive exposure to English and regular processing of the English pronouns.

This study investigates the acquisition of the third person pronoun keoi5 [inline-graphic 02i] with inanimate referents in post-verbal position (henceforth, keoi) in Hong Kong Cantonese. Following a linguistic analysis of keoi vis-à-vis its equivalents it in English and tā [inline-graphic 03i] in Mandarin Chinese, we conducted a corpus-based study on the use of keoi in 9 Cantonese-English bilingual children (1;03–4;06) and 3 Cantonese monolingual children (1;10–2;09) in naturalistic settings. Results show that Cantonese-speaking children mainly used keoi as a canonical object of verbal predicates expressing irrealis bounded disposal events, indicating their early sensitivity to the aspectual properties of keoi-clauses. While monolingual children were consistently adult-like in using keoi, bilingual children produced unbounded keoi-clauses unattested in their monolingual peers and the adults. They also used higher rates of realis keoi-clauses and demonstrated interchangeable use between keoi and it in code-mixed utterances. Our findings lend support to the proposal that keoi marks bounded disposals with irrealis results or states. Input and language experience are shown to influence the acquisition of keoi-clauses, with cross-linguistic influence of English likely induced by the interplay among ambiguity of input in Cantonese, extensive exposure to English and regular processing of the English pronouns.

Previous studies on bilingual children found intact tonal development at the initial stages of interaction between Cantonese and English in successive bilingual children, whereas children exposed to both languages from birth have not been studied in this regard. We examined the production of Cantonese tones by five simultaneous bilingual children longitudinally at 2;0 and 2;6, and compared them with age-matched monolingual children using auditory analysis. Our results showed that some bilingual children had a delay at 2;0, compared to their monolingual peers. Some bilingual children also exhibited a 'high-low' template in their production, resembling the pitch pattern of English trochaic words. These findings suggest a possible early interaction of the Cantonese and English prosodic systems in which bilingual children adopted the English stress pattern in Cantonese production. The time-point along the trajectory of phonological development is important in modulating whether cross-linguistic transfer can be observed.

This paper examines the emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children from the perspective of contact-induced grammaticalization, focusing on the novel use of already. Although the adverbial already seems to serve a function similar to that of the Cantonese perfective marker zo2 in the bilingual children, other model constructions suggest that the function of already may combine those of several Cantonese particles such as the sentence-final particle laa3. The results suggest that in contact-induced grammaticalization, it is possible to develop a new category in the replica language based on multiple different but related categories in the model language. Adopting an evolutionary approach to language transmission (Mufwene, 2001), we discuss why grammaticalization in the Cantonese-English bilingual children does not seem to involve coevolution of form and meaning, why the grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children are only transient, and how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics.

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.

This article is the first in a series that will attempt to deconstruct myths about bilingualism. Language confusion is the popularly held belief (or myth) that children are incapable of becoming bi...

This study examines cross-linguistic influence of L1 on L2 and L2 on L1 and the extent to which age of L2 onset (L2 AoO) is linked to the acquisition of morpho-syntactic properties in both languages of bilingual children who acquire L1-Russian as a heritage language and L2-Hebrew as a majority language. Our investigation of L1-L2 influence focuses on morpho-syntactic features, whose configurations vary in Russian and Hebrew. Definiteness is realized in Hebrew (but not in Russian), aspect is selected in Russian (but not in Hebrew), and [ACC] case is realized in both languages (but the mapping is different across the two languages); finally, the features of [Person], [Number] and [Gender] are mapped onto verbal inflections in both languages. A total of 110 Russian-Hebrew bilingual children aged 5;5–6;5 with varying ages of L2-Hebrew onset (0–60 months), 20 Hebrew-speaking monolinguals and 20 Russian-speaking monolinguals participated. Results demonstrate cross-linguistic influence, showing that it is bi-directional (L1 on L2 and L2 on L1). The patterns of cross-linguistic influence were similar: bilinguals performed similarly to monolinguals on features, with similar configurations in L1 and L2 (i.e., subject-verb agreement) but performed lower for properties realized differently in L1 and L2 (i.e., [DEF] articles in L2-Hebrew; [PERF] aspect and [ACC] case inflections in L1-Russian). The results also showed an effect of L2 AoO on the acquisition of both L1 and L2. Children with earlier AoO to L2-Hebrew (before 24 months) achieve better mastery in L2-Hebrew and performed lower in L1-Russian. Conversely, later AoOs to L2, led to better mastery of L1 and weaknesses in the acquisition of L2. Findings are discussed in light of theFeature Re-assembly Hypothesis.