A gateway to complexity: A cross-linguistic comparison of child bilingual speech

2020 ◽  
pp. 136700692095672
Author(s):  
Antje Endesfelder Quick ◽  
Dorota Gaskins ◽  
Oksana Bailleul ◽  
Maria Frick ◽  
Elina Palola
Keyword(s):  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Bilingual Corpora

Objectives: This study investigates monolingual and code-mixed utterances in four bilingual children with different language combinations (German–English, English–Polish, Finnish–English, and French–Russian) in terms of utterance lengths (MLUs) and complexities offering a usage-based (UB) explanation based on cognitive mechanisms. Methodology: Utterances from four different child bilingual corpora were extracted and coded for individual monolingual languages and bilingual utterances. Data and analysis: 35.441 utterances between the age of 2–4 were analyzed in terms of MLU and syntactic complexity. Findings/conclusions: Results showed that for all children monolingual MLUs and complexities reflect their input situations: the more input in one language, the longer and more complex those utterances were. However, in all four children code-mixed utterances were longer and more complex from the beginning of the recordings. Implications: This is the first study that systematically compares MLU scores and complexities of monolingual and bilingual utterances taking diverse language combinations into account and offering a UB explanation based on chunking and entrenchment processes as a new alternative for further research in bilingualism.

scholarly journals Cognitive Mechanisms of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Monoliterate Educational Settings: Evidence From Sentence Repetition

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Andreou ◽  
Ianthi Maria Tsimpli ◽  
Elvira Masoura ◽  
Eleni Agathopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Educational Setting ◽  
Visuospatial Working Memory ◽  
Expressive Vocabulary ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Bilingual Advantage ◽  
Sentence Repetition

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been extensively employed to assess bilingual children’s linguistic and cognitive resources. The present study examined whether monoliterate bilingual children differ from their monolingual (and monoliterate) peers in SR accuracy and cognitive tasks, and investigated links between vocabulary, updating, verbal and visuospatial working memory and SR performance in the same children. Participants were two groups of 35 children, 8–12 years of age: one group consisted of Albanian-Greek monoliterate bilingual children and the other of Greek monolingual children attending a monolingual-Greek educational setting. The findings demonstrate that the two groups performed similarly in the grammaticality scores of the SR. However, monolinguals outperformed the monoliterate bilinguals in SR accuracy, as well as in the visuospatial working memory and updating tasks. The findings did not indicate any bilingual advantage in cognitive performance. The results also demonstrate that updating and visuospatial working memory significantly predicted monolingual children’s SR accuracy scores, whereas Greek vocabulary predicted the performance of our monoliterate bilingual children in the same task. We attribute this outcome to the fact that monoliterate bilingual children do not rely on their fluid cognitive resources to perform the task, but instead rely on language proficiency (indicated by expressive vocabulary) while performing the SR.

Analyzing language samples of Spanish–English bilingual children for the automated prediction of language dominance

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. SOLORIO ◽  
M. SHERMAN ◽  
Y. LIU ◽  
L. M. BEDORE ◽  
E. D. PEÑA ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Communication Disorders ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Language Dominance ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Discriminative Value ◽  
Language Profiles

AbstractIn this work we study how features typically used in natural language processing tasks, together with measures from syntactic complexity, can be adapted to the problem of developing language profiles of bilingual children. Our experiments show that these features can provide high discriminative value for predicting language dominance from story retells in a Spanish–English bilingual population of children. Moreover, some of our proposed features are even more powerful than measures commonly used by clinical researchers and practitioners for analyzing spontaneous language samples of children. This study shows that the field of natural language processing has the potential to make significant contributions to communication disorders and related areas.

scholarly journals Grammatical Characteristics of Vietnamese and English in Developing Bilingual Children

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 1212-1225
Author(s):  
Quynh Dam ◽  
Giang Pham ◽  
Irina Potapova ◽  
Sonja Pruitt-Lord
Keyword(s):  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Developmental Patterns ◽  
Error Patterns ◽  
Second Languages ◽  
Grammatical Development ◽  
Story Retell

Purpose Defining parameters for typical development in bilingual children's first and second languages can serve as the basis for accurate language assessment. This is the first study to characterize Vietnamese and English grammatical development in a sample of bilingual children. Method Participants were 89 Vietnamese–English bilingual children, aged 3–8 years. Children completed story retell tasks in Vietnamese and English. Stories were transcribed and analyzed for grammaticality, error patterns, subordination index, and types of subordinating clauses. Of key interest were associations with age and identifying developmental patterns that were shared across languages or unique to a given language. Results Age correlated with more measures in English than in Vietnamese, suggesting that older children had higher grammaticality and greater syntactic complexity in English than younger children. Children also produced greater syntactic complexity with age in Vietnamese, but not higher grammaticality. There were a set of error patterns shared across languages (e.g., object omission) and patterns specific to each language (e.g., classifier errors in Vietnamese, tense errors in English). While children produced nominal, adverbial, and relative clauses in Vietnamese and English, the proportion of each clause type differed by language. Conclusions Results from this typically developing sample provide a reference point to improve clinical practice. Characterizing developmental patterns in sentence structure in Vietnamese and English lays the groundwork for investigations of language disorders in this bilingual population.

Bilingual reference production

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 569-599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacopo Torregrossa ◽  
Christiane Bongartz ◽  
Ianthi Maria Tsimpli
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Lexical Retrieval ◽  
Cognitive Profiles ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Referring Expressions ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Lower Activation

Abstract We investigate reference production in bilingual children. Based on Kibrik (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.

The acquisition of Spanish and English as two first languages through the analysis of natural interpreting in bilingual children

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel Fernández Fuertes ◽  
Esther Álvarez de la Fuente
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Simultaneous Processing ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
First Languages ◽  
Bilingual Corpora ◽  
The Way

Abstract Research on the acquisition of two first languages from birth (2L1A) has focused, among other issues, on how the grammars of the two languages being acquired interact (e.g. Bhatia & Ritchie, 2012; De Houwer, 2009; Deuchar & Quay, 2000; Döpke, 2000; Köppe & Meisel, 1995). A case in point is natural interpreting which evidences how bilingual children exposed to two languages from birth deal with the grammatical properties of the two languages and how this leads them to potentially convey the same message in either (or both) of these languages. More specifically, as part of the simultaneous processing of their two L1s, 2L1 bilingual children have been reported to often translate between their two L1s (Álvarez de la Fuente & Fernández Fuertes, 2012, 2015; Cossato, 2008; Harris, 1980a, 1980b; Harris & Sherwood, 1978), a phenomenon that has been called natural interpreting (Harris, 1977, 2003). In this respect, natural interpreting can be included with other language contact phenomena, such as interlinguistic influence or code-switching, as a typical defining property of 2L1A. Therefore, in this study we aim to offer an analysis of the way in which Spanish-English bilingual children use natural interpreting in their 2L1A process by focusing on the Spanish-English bilingual corpora freely available through the CHILDES project (MacWhinney, 2000).

Children's comprehension of ‘before’ and ‘after’ reinvestigated

1982 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Trosborg
Keyword(s):  
Memory Load ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Relative Time ◽  
Relative Difficulty ◽  
Task Requirement ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Contextual Support ◽  
Event Order ◽  
Sentence Order

ABSTRACTThe present paper is concerned with establishing the relative difficulty involved in the acquisition of the temporal conjunctions before and after. It tries to control the influence on performance of the following variables: contextual support within a sentence (logically/arbitrarily ordered sequences), order of mention, syntactic complexity, task requirement variables, and memory load. In addition, experiments intended to throw light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying an understanding of these conjuctions are described. The concept of time is supposed to be spatial in origin. An understanding of relative time is dependent on ability to decentre and coordinate. Finally, it is suggested that reversible thinking (in a Piagetian sense) is involved in the process of making inverse sentence order agree with event order.

scholarly journals The Influence of Tonal and Atonal Bilingualism on Children’s Lexical and Non-Lexical Tone Perception

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura M. Morett
Keyword(s):  
Sine Wave ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Lexical Tone ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Tonal Language ◽  
Lexical Tones ◽  
Tone Perception ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Tone Discrimination ◽  
Novel Words

This study examined how bilingualism in an atonal language, in addition to a tonal language, influences lexical and non-lexical tone perception and word learning during childhood. Forty children aged 5;3–7;2, bilingual either in English and Mandarin or English and another atonal language, were tested on Mandarin lexical tone discrimination, level-pitch sine-wave tone discrimination, and learning of novel words differing minimally in Mandarin lexical tone. Mandarin–English bilingual children discriminated between and learned novel words differing minimally in Mandarin lexical tone more accurately than their atonal–English bilingual peers. However, Mandarin–English and atonal–English bilingual children discriminated between level-pitch sine-wave tones with similar accuracy. Moreover, atonal–English bilingual children showed a tendency to perceive differing Mandarin lexical and level-pitch sine-wave tones as identical, whereas their Mandarin–English peers showed no such tendency. These results indicate that bilingualism in a tonal language in addition to an atonal language—but not bilingualism in two atonal languages—allows for continued sensitivity to lexical tone beyond infancy. Moreover, they suggest that although tonal–atonal bilingualism does not enhance sensitivity to differences in pitch between sine-wave tones beyond infancy any more effectively than atonal–atonal bilingualism, it protects against the development of biases to perceive differing lexical and non-lexical tones as identical. Together, the results indicate that, beyond infancy, tonal–atonal bilinguals process lexical tones using different cognitive mechanisms than atonal–atonal bilinguals, but that both groups process level-pitch non-lexical tone using the same cognitive mechanisms.

scholarly journals Adjective placement in simultaneous bilinguals (German–Italian) and the concept of cross-linguistic overcorrection

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 222-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
TANJA KUPISCH
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Language Dominance ◽  
Do So

Cross-linguistic influence (CLI) has been claimed to occur under the conditions of structural overlap, interfacing, syntactic complexity and language dominance. This study tested adjective placement in the Italian of 19 adult German–Italian simultaneous bilinguals, comparing naturalistic and experimental data. The results show no CLI from German, although the conditions for CLI are given. Instead, bilingual adults tend to overuse a structure that is unique to Italian, unlike bilingual children in previous studies. However, they do so only in the experimental data. In order to account for this, I introduce the concept of cross-linguistic overcorrection in contrast to cross-linguistic influence.

The bottleneck may be the solution, not the problem

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnon Lotem ◽  
Oren Kolodny ◽  
Joseph Y. Halpern ◽  
Luca Onnis ◽  
Shimon Edelman
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Recent Theory ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Selection Pressures ◽  
Biological Trait ◽  
Memory Bottleneck

AbstractAs a highly consequential biological trait, a memory “bottleneck” cannot escape selection pressures. It must therefore co-evolve with other cognitive mechanisms rather than act as an independent constraint. Recent theory and an implemented model of language acquisition suggest that a limit on working memory may evolve to help learning. Furthermore, it need not hamper the use of language for communication.

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