Bilingual Children's Production Research Articles

Monolingual and bilingual children's production of complex syntactic structures.

Typically-developing bilingual children often score lower than monolingual peers of the same age on standardized measures; however, research has shown that when assessed in more natural discourse contexts, bilinguals can perform similar to age-matched monolinguals in some language subdomains. This study investigated complex syntax production in simultaneous French-English bilingual children and monolingual age-matched peers, using structured and spontaneous measures. Surprisingly, the bilinguals scored higher than the monolinguals on the structured task. There was no difference between groups on the spontaneous measure; however, predictors of complex syntax production differed by language groups and by tasks. Contrary to other language subdomains showing bilingual English development as protracted relative to monolingual peers, these results point to a relative strength of complex syntax acquisition among simultaneous bilingual children. Differences in exposure relative to monolingual children may be less pronounced in syntax, in part because bilinguals can benefit from syntactic knowledge in their other language.

Reference production in Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers: Linguistic, input, and cognitive factors.

Reference in extended discourse is vulnerable to delayed acquisition in early childhood. Although recent research has increasingly focused on effects of linguistic, input, and cognitive factors on reference production, these studies are limited in number and the results are mixed. The present study provides insight into bilingual reference production by investigating how production of referring expressions in the two languages of preschool bilingual children may be influenced by structural similarities and differences between the languages, frequency of referring expressions in maternal input, amount of exposure to each of the languages, and working memory capacity. Using two stories in the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), we examined character introduction and re-introduction in oral narratives of 4–6-year-old Singaporean bilingual children acquiring Mandarin Chinese and English (n = 21), and in child-directed speech of the mothers (n = 17). The children’s language exposure, executive function, and general bilingual proficiency were also recorded or directly tested through structured interviews with the parents or standardized assessments with the children. Data collection was conducted remotely in real time over a video-conferencing platform, supplemented by on-site audio recording to ensure sound quality. Results showed prolonged development in the production of felicitous REs for first mentions and over-reliance on overt marking of definiteness in our bilingual children. Mixed modeling revealed that frequency of felicitous REs in the input predicted children’s production of felicitous REs across languages and discourse functions, with a modulating effect of working memory. Overall, our findings are consistent with previous ones in that reference production is vulnerable in early Mandarin-English bilinguals in a multilingual society. This study also presents novel evidence that structural frequency in the input interacts with working memory in shaping patterns of reference production in bilingual children.

Bilingual reference production

AbstractWe investigate reference production in bilingual children. Based onKibrik (2011), we analyze the production of referring expressions in discourse in terms of activation of a referent. We propose a novel approach, which calculates activation by taking into account different activation-lending factors and their respective weight. This allows us to compare the activation encoded by referring expressions across languages and groups of speakers, and to run correlational analyses with the speakers’ cognitive profiles. In particular, the study addresses the correlation between activation and lexical processing among bilinguals, based on the distribution of referring expressions in narratives by 20 German-Greek bilingual children, compared to their monolingual peers. We found that bilingual pronouns correspond to a lower activation than monolingual ones. Speed of lexical retrieval is a predictor of the bilingual performance. Our model of analysis accounts for how reference production varies across individuals and which cognitive mechanisms underlie this variation.

Korean-English bilingual children's production of stop contrasts*

Korean-English bilingual children's production of stop contrasts*

Some features of speech production in bilingual children from bi-ethnic families

Some features of speech production in bilingual children from bi-ethnic families

Le langage oral en production chez les enfants bilingues : quels liens avec l’exposition ?

L’objectif de cette étude est d’observer les effets de l’exposition aux langues sur différentes variables linguistiques en production orale d’enfants bilingues français/anglais sans pathologie, scolarisés dans une école internationale publique (France), et répartis en deux groupes d’âges (groupe 1 :N= 10,M= 6;3; groupe 2 :N= 15,M= 10;2). Des questionnaires parentaux ont permis d’obtenir des mesures quant à l’exposition courante et cumulative aux langues ainsi qu’à la fréquence à laquelle les enfants lisent dans les deux langues. À partir de tests de vocabulaire réceptif standardisés et de productions narratives(Frog, where are you?), des données linguistiques françaises et anglaises ont été obtenues. Les narrations ont été transcrites en respectant les conventionsCHILDESdans le logicielCLAN, permettant l’observation de diverses mesures linguistiques relatives au lexique, à la morphosyntaxe et au discours. Des corrélations ont été effectuées entre les mesures d’exposition et celles des performances linguistiques. Les résultats révèlent que le vocabulaire réceptif et certaines mesures de productivité narrative semblent être sensibles au degré d’exposition de chaque langue. De plus, nos conclusions renforcent l’idée du rÔle essentiel de la lecture sur la performance linguistique, et ce d’autant plus pour les enfants les plus jeunes. Pour finir, cette étude souligne l’importance de travailler en étroite collaboration avec les équipes pédagogiques et les parents d’enfants bilingues afin de fournir des recommandations concrètes pour enrichir le langage oral.

Parent report of early lexical production in bilingual children: a cross-linguistic CDI comparison

ABSTRACTThis paper compared the vocabulary size of a group of 250 bilinguals aged 24–36 months acquiring six different language pairs using an analogous tool, and attempted to identify factors that influence vocabulary sizes and ultimately place children at risk for language delay. Each research group used adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Sentences and a specially designed developmental and language background questionnaire to gather information on risk factors for language impairment, demographic and language exposure variables. The results showed a wide range in vocabulary development which could be somewhat attributed to mothers’ education status, parental concerns about language development and amount of exposure to the second language. We looked at those children performing below the 10th and above the 90th percentile to determine what factors were related to their vocabulary size. Features of the entire group of lower performing children were fewer than 50 words and the absence of two-word combinations by 24 months, lower levels of parental education and parental concerns about language development. The implications for identifying bilingual children at risk for language impairment as well as the language enrichment that might be needed for young bilinguals are outlined.

Speech Practice Effects on Bilingual Children's Fast Mapping Performance.

Learning a new word involves many subsystems and their interactions. The purpose of this study was to examine whether speech practice facilitates the subsequent fast mapping performance of bilingual preschool children. Participants were 18 typically developing preschoolers who learned Cantonese (L1) as a home language and English (L2) as a second language. Each participant was asked to repeat each of the four novel words after an auditory model (speech practice) before he or she was exposed to the novel word-objects in the subsequent fast mapping task. Significant speech practice and language effects on fast mapping production scores were found. These findings suggest a complex relationship between speech learning, fast mapping, and L1-L2 language skills. Our results suggest that clinical methods that facilitate bilingual children's production skills (e.g., repeat after a model) hold promise as a means of improving the initial stage of word learning in both languages.

Bilingual children's production of regular and irregular past tense morphology

This study examined the production of the Dutch past tense in Dutch–Hebrew bilingual children and investigated the effect of type of past tense allomorph (de versus te) and token frequency on productions of the past tense. Seven-year-old bilingual children (n=11) were compared with monolingual children: age-matched (n=30) and younger vocabulary-matched (n=21). Accuracy of regular and novel past tense was similar for the bilingual and monolingual groups, but the former group was worse on irregular past tense than the age-matched monolingual peers. All three groups showed effects of type frequency: te past tenses were more accurate than de. The difference between the bilingual and monolingual children surfaces in the extent of the effect: for the bilingual children it was most pronounced in verbs with low token frequency and novel verbs. Results are interpreted as stemming from a learning strategy or from phonological transfer from the Hebrew morphosyntactic system.

A study of Swedish speakers' learning of Chinese noun classifiers

Chinese noun classifiers are an obligatory category associated with nouns. Studies have shown that achieving a full understanding and good mastery of Chinese noun classifiers is difficult for both young and adult L2 learners. This study examines the learning strategies used by 30 Swedish adults for a period of two months. Their learning results are compared to 30 bilingual children's production of Chinese noun classifiers. The adult learners exhibit a normal top–down learning fashion, in which they fail to acquire the complex semantic and cognitive meanings embedded in the classifiers. The children, on the other hand, apply cognitive strategies with a bottom–up approach. The adults’ learning of classifiers lags surprisingly far behind their general level of Chinese proficiency. This study can be used as a reference for future studies on the conceptual and cognitive aspects of Chinese language acquisition by speakers whose native languages are not classifier languages.

Crosslinguistic transfer in the acquisition of compound words in Persian–English bilinguals

Crosslinguistic transfer in bilingual language acquisition has been widely reported in various linguistic domains (e.g., Döpke, 1998; Nicoladis, 1999; Paradis, 2001). In this study we examined structural overlap (Döpke, 2000; Müller and Hulk, 2001) and dominance (Yip and Matthews, 2000) as explanatory factors for crosslinguistic transfer in Persian–English bilingual children's production of novel compound words. Nineteen Persian monolinguals, sixteen Persian–English bilinguals, and seventeen English monolinguals participated in a novel compound production task. Our results showed crosslinguistic influence of Persian on English and of English on Persian. Bilingual children produced more right-headed compounds in Persian, compared with Persian monolinguals, and in their English task, they produced more left-headed compounds than English monolinguals. Furthermore, Persian-dominant bilinguals tended more towards left-headed compounds in Persian than the English-dominant group. These findings point to both structural overlap and language dominance as factors underlying crosslinguistic transfer.

Cross-linguistic transfer in deverbal compounds of preschool bilingual children

Cross-linguistic transfer can be explained by structural ambiguity in a bilingual child's two languages (Döpke, 1998; Hulk and Müller, 2000). This study examined the effect of morphological ambiguity in transfer of deverbal compounds in English and French. English-speaking children go through a stage of producing ungrammatical verb-object compounds in their acquisition of object-verb-er compounds. In French, verb-object compounds are productive. If structural ambiguity predicts when transfer occurs, French-English bilingual children should use more ungrammatical verb-object compounds than English-speaking children and more grammatical verb-object compounds than French-speaking children. This study focused on 36 French-English bilingual children's production and comprehension of novel deverbal compounds in both languages. The results supported these predictions for production but not for comprehension. It is concluded that cross-linguistic transfer is a language production phenomenon and that structural ambiguity can predict when morphological transfer can occur.

A developmental study of Spanish-English production in bilingual children.

A developmental study of Spanish-English production in bilingual children.

A developmental study of Spanish-English production in bilingual children.

A developmental study of Spanish-English production in bilingual children.