Similarities and Differences between Simultaneous and Successive Bilingual Children: Acquisition of Japanese Morphology

Yuki Itani-Adams,Junko Iwasaki,Satomi Kawaguchi

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.6n.7p.268

Abstract

This paper compares the acquisition of Japanese morphology of two bilingual children who had different types of exposure to Japanese language in Australia: a simultaneous bilingual child who had exposure to both Japanese and English from birth, and a successive bilingual child who did not have regular exposure to Japanese until he was six years and three months old. The comparison is carried out using Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann 1998, 2005) as a common framework, and the corpus for this study consists of the naturally spoken production of these two Australian children. The results show that both children went through the same developmental path in their acquisition of the Japanese morphological structures, indicating that the same processing mechanisms are at work for both types of language acquisition. However, the results indicate that there are some differences between the two children, including the rate of acquisition, and the kinds of verbal morphemes acquired. The results of this study add further insight to an ongoing debate in the field of bilingual language acquisition: whether simultaneous bilingual children develop their language like a first language or like a second language.

Highlights

Do children who acquire more than one language simultaneously from birth develop each language like monolingual first language (L1) learners, or like second language (L2) learners? This question has drawn much attention in the field of simultaneous bilingual language acquisition
This study addresses the nature of bilingual language development, focusing on the relationships between the simultaneous bilingual and L2
We compare the development of Japanese morphology of a balanced simultaneous bilingual child, with a successive bilingual child who acquired Japanese as L2

Summary

Introduction

Do children who acquire more than one language simultaneously from birth develop each language like monolingual first language (L1) learners, or like second language (L2) learners? This question has drawn much attention in the field of simultaneous bilingual language acquisition. Past studies have found that the two languages of simultaneous bilingual children can be acquired independently from each other, like two first languages (e.g., De Houwer 1990, 1995, 2005, 2009 for summary of past research; Lanza 1997; Meisel 1990, 2001; Mishina-Mori 2002; Paradis & Genesee 1996) These studies have concluded that simultaneous bilingual children develop their languages like L1, based on the following findings: (1) simultaneous bilingual children differentiate the two languages from very early on, through use of the appropriate language in a specific language context; (2) no systematic transfer of linguistic properties from one language to the other was demonstrated; (3) based on findings that bilingual children did not show any delay or acceleration in timing of acquisition of certain grammatical structures compared to the L1 children, simultaneous bilingual children follow the same developmental paths as the L1 children in terms of morphology and syntax. In the existing literature (e.g. Schlyter 1993; Döpke 1996; Jisa 2000) balance is often defined by the comparison of the mean length of utterance (MLU) values of the two languages against the child’s age; the language possessing a lower MLU at the same age is labeled the ‘weaker’ language

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion