Production and processing asymmetries in the acquisition of tense morphology by sequential bilingual children

Chondrogianni, V. and Marinis, T. (2012) Production and processing asymmetries in the acquisition of tense morphology by sequential bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15 (1). pp. 5-21. ISSN 1469-1841 doi: 10.1017/S1366728911000368 (Special Issue 01 Bilingual children with specific language impairment)

Abstract/Summary

This study investigates the production and on-line processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty nine 6-9-year-old L2 children and 28 typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production component for third person –s and past tense of the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 1996) and participated in an on-line word-monitoring task involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with presence/omission of tense (third person –s, past tense -ed) and non-tense (progressive –ing, possessive ‘s) morphemes. The L2 children’s performance on the on-line task was compared to that of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Montgomery & Leonard (1998, 2006) to ascertain similarities and differences between the two populations. Results showed that the L2 children were sensitive to the ungrammaticality induced by the omission of tense morphemes, despite variable production. This reinforces the claim about intact underlying syntactic representations in child L2 acquisition despite non target-like production (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997).

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/26604
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Clinical Language Sciences Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Language and Cognition
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item