Language convergence and bilingual acquisition

This study concerns the simultaneous acquisition of conditional constructions in Chinese-English bilingual preschool children in Singapore. Cross-sectional data are obtained from subjects ranging from 2;10 to 6;06. The target languages are Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) and Singapore Colloquial Mandarin (SCM), both of which are contact varieties that are representative of the Low varieties in a diglossic situation. The bilingual acquisition of structural features of conditionals is investigated by adopting the Head-marking and Dependent-marking typological framework (Nichols 1986). Two elicited imitation experiments were conducted, with Experiment 1 aimed at examining if the structural convergence between SCE and SCM that is evident at a societal level is also represented in the developing linguistic repertoires of the bilingual preschool children. Experiment 2 is a follow-up study designed to investigate if convergence between the two languages is also evident at an individual level. Results obtained in Experiment 1 suggest that convergence between the two developing linguistic systems is indeed apparent. Also evident is the influence of Chinese on SCE, while the influence of English on SCM is less apparent. At the individual level, however, a general lack of convergence between the two developing grammars within a single subject is observed in Experiment 2: the marking preferences for SCE and SCM conditionals tend not to coincide for a particular subject, suggesting that the two languages are represented as distinct grammatical systems for the bilingual children.

Early foreign language education and metalinguistic development

Studies with bilingual and multilingual subjects suggest that bilingualism and multilingualism foster the development of certain aspects of children’s metalinguistic skills. The purpose of the present study was to find out if learning foreign languages facilitates children’s metalinguistic ability to define words. It compared Bulgarian monolingual, bilingual and trilingual subjects on their word-definition performance in the L1. The relationship between L1 definition performance, L2/L3 proficiency, and L2/L3 definition performance within the bilingual and trilingual groups was also investigated. The study found that early foreign language education has a positive effect on the quality of children’s definitions in their L1. The bilingual and trilingual children performed significantly better than the monolingual children. The results specific to the bilingual and trilingual groups showed that second/third language proficiency was a significant and powerful predictor of the performance of the bilingual and trilingual subjects on the word-definition tasks in their second/third language. L1 word-definition ability was a weaker predictor of the subjects’ performance on the word-definition task in their second or third language. However, in the case of genetically closely related languages (Bulgarian and Russian) the transfer was easier as compared to genetically more distanced languages (Bulgarian and English).

The acquisition of inflectional prefixes in Nairobi Swahili

This study investigates the acquisition of inflectional prefixes in Swahili, an eastern Bantu language. The order of morphemes in adult Swahili is: Subject Agreement – Tense – (Object Agreement) –Verb Root – (derivational suffixes) –Mood Vowel. I present data from an original corpus of 4 Swahili-speaking children (ages 1;8-3;0) who were recorded in Nairobi, Kenya. An analysis of the children’s verbal utterances reveals that four clause types occur in the speech of all four children: a. Agr–T–Verb StemFull Clause b. Ø–T–Verb Stem[-SA] Clause c. Agr–Ø–Verb Stem[-T] Clause d. ؖؖVerb StemBare Verb Stem Of these four, only full clauses and [-SA] clauses are permitted by adults in this non-standard dialect of Swahili. A review of five influential theories on the acquisition of morphosyntax (the Metrical Omission Model, Gerken, 1991; the Truncation Hypothesis, Rizzi, 1994; the Underspecification of T, Wexler, 1994; the underspecification of Agr, Clahsen et al. , 1996; and the underspecification of Agr and T, Schütze & Wexler, 1996) shows that the data support the Agr-Tense Omission Model (Schütze & Wexler, 1996) in showing that agreement and tense may be optionally and independently underspecified.

Language discrimination by newborns

Speech rhythm has long been claimed to be a useful bootstrapping cue in the very first steps of language acquisition. Previous studies have suggested that newborn infants do categorize varieties of speech rhythm, as demonstrated by their ability to discriminate between certain languages. However, the existing evidence is not unequivocal: in previous studies, stimuli discriminated by newborns always contained additional speech cues on top of rhythm. Here, we conducted a series of experiments assessing discrimination between Dutch and Japanese by newborn infants, using a speech resynthesis technique to progressively degrade non-rhythmical properties of the sentences. When the stimuli are resynthesized using identical phonemes and artificial intonation contours for the two languages, thereby preserving only their rhythmic and broad phonotactic structure, newborns still seem to be able to discriminate between the two languages, but the effect is weaker than when intonation is present. This leaves open the possibility that the temporal correlation between intonational and rhythmic cues might actually facilitate the processing of speech rhythm.