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Acquisition of English grammatical morphology by internationally adopted children from China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2012

LARA J. PIERCE ,
FRED GENESEE  and
JOHANNE PARADIS
LARA J. PIERCE*
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
FRED GENESEE
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
JOHANNE PARADIS
Affiliation:
University of Alberta, Canada
*
Address for correspondence: Lara Pierce, McGill University – Psychology, 1205 Dr Penfield, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1B1, Canada. e-mail: lara.pierce@mail.mcgill.ca
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Abstract

Acquisition of English grammatical morphology was examined in five internationally adopted (IA) children from China (aged 0;10–1;1 at adoption) during the first three years' exposure to English to determine whether acquisition patterns were characteristic of child second language (L2) learners or monolingual first language (L1) learners. Results from spontaneous and elicited speech showed that IA children acquired grammatical morphemes similarly to L1 learners; namely, (1) non-tense-marking morphemes were acquired earlier than tense-marking morphemes; (2) BE was acquired in synchrony with other tense-marking morphemes; and (3) a high percentage of omission errors and a low percentage of commission errors were observed.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Issue 5 , November 2013 , pp. 1076 - 1090
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to Fred Genesee and an NSERC fellowship to Lara Pierce. The authors wish to acknowledge Kristina Maiorino and Sonia Guerrero for help with data collection and transcription, Alexia Sawyer for help with transcript and coding reliability, and Tamara Sorenson Duncan for assistance with coding procedure. We would also like to thank the children and their parents for their generous time and effort.

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