Why jumped is so difficult: tense/aspect marking in Mandarin-English bilingual children.

Abstract

Learning to mark for tense in a second language is notoriously difficult for speakers of a tenseless language like Chinese. In this study we test two reasons for these difficulties in Chinese-English sequential bilingual children: (1) morphophonological transfer (i.e., avoidance of complex codas), and (2) interpretation of -ed as an aspect marker of completion, like the Mandarin -le. Mandarin-English bilingual children and age-matched monolinguals did a cartoon retell task. The verbs used in the stories were coded for accuracy in English, telicity, and suppliance of -ed or -le. The results were consistent with morphophonological transfer: the bilingual children were more accurate with irregular past forms in English than regular forms. The results were also consistent with the bilingual children's interpretation of -ed as an aspect marker: most of their production of -ed was on telic verbs. We discuss possible reasons for the children's interpretation of -ed as an aspect marker.