Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T05:29:54.307Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The role of consistency in use of morphosyntactic forms in child-directed speech in the acquisition of Irish, a minority language undergoing rapid language change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2019

Stanislava ANTONIJEVIC ,
Sarah Ann MUCKLEY  and
Nicole MÜLLER
Stanislava ANTONIJEVIC*
Affiliation:
National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland
Sarah Ann MUCKLEY
Affiliation:
National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland HSE West, Ireland
Nicole MÜLLER
Affiliation:
University College Cork, Ireland
*
*Corresponding author: Speech & Language Therapy, Aras Moyola, NUI Galway, University Road, Galway, Ireland E-mail: stanislava.antonijevic@nuigalway.ie
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Irish is a rapidly changing minority language spoken as the main community language in some areas of the officially Irish-speaking Gaeltacht regions in Ireland. We analyse narratives from 17 parent–child dyads, living in one such area. All children, aged 3–6;4, had high exposure to the local variety of Irish. The input quality was measured by specifying consistency and accuracy of use of morphosyntactic forms in parental narratives directed to their children. The same morphosyntactic forms were analysed in narrative retell by the children. The children produced with high accuracy those forms that the parents used consistently and accurately. For the forms where parents’ usage was inconsistent, large variation in the children's usage was observed. The findings suggest that consistency and accuracy in the use of morphosyntactic forms in the parental language is an important factor in language acquisition; however, its influence might be confounded by other factors.

Keywords

language acquisitionmorphosyntaxIrishinputexposure
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 47 , Special Issue 2: The Influence of Input Quality and Communicative Interaction on Language Development Part 2 , March 2020 , pp. 267 - 288
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Antonijevic, S., Durham, R., & Ní Chonghaile, I. (2017). Language performance of sequential bilinguals on an Irish and English sentence repetition task. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7, 359–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ball, M. J., & Müller, N. (1992). Mutation in Welsh. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cameron-Faulkner, T., & Hickey, T. M. (2011). Form and function in Irish child directed speech. Cognitive Linguistics, 22(3), 569–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, S. (2017a). Exposure and input in bilingual development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(1), 3–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, S. (2017b). Explaining bilingual learning outcomes in terms of exposure and input. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(1), 37–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chondrogianni, V., & Marinis, T. (2011). Differential effects of internal and external factors on the development of vocabulary, tense morphology and morpho-syntax in successive bilingual children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 318–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cornips, L., & Hulk, A. (2006). External and internal factors in bilingual and bidialectal language development: grammatical gender of the Dutch definite determiner. In Lefebvre, C., White, L., & Jourdan, C. (Eds.), L2 acquisition and creole genesis: the Montreal dialogues (pp. 355–77). Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CSO (The Central Statistics Office) (2017). Census 2016, Profile 7: Irish Language. Dublin: Stationery Office.Google Scholar
Daskalaki, E., Chondrogianni, V., Blom, E., Argyri, F., & Paradis, J. (2019). Input effects across domains: the case of Greek subjects in child heritage language. Second Language Research, 35(3), 421–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Bhaldraithe, T. (1977). Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge: an deilbhíocht. Baile Átha Cliath: Institiúid Árd-Léinn Bhaile Átha Cliath.Google Scholar
De Houwer, A. (2007). Parental language input patterns and children's bilingual use. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 411–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Houwer, A. (2014). The absolute frequency of maternal input to bilingual and monolingual children: a first comparison. In Grüter, T. & Paradis, J. (Eds.), Input and experience in bilingual development (Trends in Language Acquisition Research (TiLAR), 13) (pp. 37–58). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M., & Thomas, E. M. (2009). Bilingual first language development: dominant language takeover, threatened minority language take-up. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 213–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Golderg, H., Paradis, J., & Crago, M. (2008). Lexical acquisition over time in minority first language children learning English as a second language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 41–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, F. (1989). Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person. Brain and Language, 36(1), 3–15.Google Scholar
Grüter, T., Hurtado, N., Marchman, V. A., & Fernald, A. (2014). Language exposure and online processing efficiency in bilingual development: relative versus absolute measures. In Grüter, T. & Paradis, J. (Eds.), Input and experience in bilingual development (Trends in Language Acquisition Research (TiLAR), 13) (pp. 15–36). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Gutiérrez-Clellen, V. F. & Kreiter, J. (2003). Understanding child bilingual acquisition using parent and teacher reports. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 267–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, R. (2014). The sound structure of Modern Irish. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, T. M. (1990a). The acquisition of Irish: word order development. Journal of Child Language, 17(1), 17–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, T. M. (1990b). ILARSP: a grammatical profile of Irish. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 4, 363–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, T. M. (1991). Mean Length of Utterance and the acquisition of Irish. Journal of Child Language, 18, 553–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hickey, T. M. (2007). Children's language networks and teachers’ input in minority language immersion: what goes in may not come out. Language and Education, 21(1), 46–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, T. M. (2009). Codeswitching and borrowing in Irish. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13(5), 670–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kallen, J. L. (2001). Preface: the acquisition of Celtic languages. Journal of Celtic Language Learning, 6, 5–8.Google Scholar
Lieven, E. (2014). First language development: a usage-based perspective on past and current research. Journal of Child Language, 41, 48–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mayer, M. (1969). Frog, where are you? New York: Dial Press.Google Scholar
Meir, N., Walters, J., & Armon-Lotem, S. (2016). Disentangling SLI and bilingualism using sentence repetition tasks: the impact of L1 and L2 properties. International Journal of Bilingualism, 20(4), 421–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merritt, D. D., & Liles, B. Z. (1989). Narrative analysis: clinical applications of story generation and story retelling. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 54, 438–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Muckley, S. A. (2016). Language assessment of native Irish speaking children: towards developing diagnostic testing for speech and language therapy practice. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, National University of Ireland Galway. Online <https://aran.library.nuigalway.ie/handle/10379/5900>..>Google Scholar
Müller, N., Muckley, S.-A., & Antonijevic-Elliott, S. (2019). Where phonology meets morphology in the context of rapid language change and universal bilingualism: Irish initial mutations in development. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 33(1/2), 3–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ní Laoire, S. (2016). Irish–English code-switching: a sociolinguistic perspective. In Hickey, R. (Ed.), Sociolinguistics in Ireland (pp. 81–106). London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Nic Fhlannachadha, S. & Hickey, T.M. (2017). Acquiring an opaque gender system in Irish, an endangered indigenous language. First Language, 37(5), 475–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nic Fhlannachadha, S. & Hickey, T.M. (2019). Assessing children's proficiency in a minority language: exploring the relationships between home language exposure, test performance and teacher and parent ratings of school-age Irish–English bilinguals. Language and Education, 33(4), 340–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ó Catháin, B. (2016). The Irish language in present-day Ireland. In Hickey, R. (Ed), Sociolinguistics in Ireland (pp. 81–106). London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Ó Curnáin, B. (2007). The Irish of Iorras Aithneach, County Galway. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.Google Scholar
Ó Murchadha, N. P. (2016). The efficacy of unitary and polynomic models of codification in minority language contexts: ideological, pragmatic and pedagogical issues in the codification of Irish. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(2), 199–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Toole, C., & Fletcher, P. (2012). Profiling vocabulary acquisition in Irish. Journal of Child Language, 39, 205–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paradis, J. (2010). Bilingual children's acquisition of verb morphology: effects of language dominance, structure difficulty, and task type. Language Learning, 60, 651–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. (2011). Individual differences in child English second language acquisition: comparing child-internal and child-external factors. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(3), 213–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. (2017). Parent report data on input and experience reliably predict bilingual development and this is not trivial. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(1), 27–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J., & Grüter, T. (2014). Introduction to ‘Input and experience in bilingual development’. In Grüter, T. & Paradis, J. (Eds.), Input and experience in bilingual development (Trends in Language Acquisition Research (TiLAR), 13) (pp. 1–14). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Paradis, J., Nicoladis, E., Crago, M., & Genesee, F. (2011). Bilingual children's acquisition of the past tense: a Usage-Based approach. Journal of Child Language, 38, 554–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paradis, J., Tremblay, A., & Crago, M. (2014). French–English bilingual children's sensitivity to child-level and language-level input factors in morphosyntactic acquisition. In Grüter, T. & Paradis, J. (Eds.), Input and experience in bilingual development (Trends in Language Acquisition Research (TiLAR), 13) (pp. 161–80). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Péterváry, T., Ó Curnáin, B., Ó Giollagáin, C., & Sheahan, J. (2014). Iniúchadh ar an gCumas Dátheangach; An Sealbhú teanga i measc ghlúin óg na Gaeltachta [Analysis of Bilingual Competence; Language acquisition among young people in the Gaeltacht]. Dublin: An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta & Gaelscolaíochta.Google Scholar
Pires, A., & Rothman, J. (2009). Disentangling sources of incomplete acquisition: an explanation for competence divergence across heritage grammars. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13(2), 211–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Place, S., & Hoff, E. (2011). Properties of dual language exposure that influence 2-year-olds’ bilingual proficiency. Child Development, 82(6), 1834–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Reilly, J., Losh, M., Bellugi, U., & Wulfeck, B. (2004). ‘Frog, where are you?’ Narratives in children with specific language impairment, early focal brain injury and Williams syndrome. Brain and Language, 88, 229–47.Google ScholarPubMed
Rodina, Y., & Westergaard, M. (2017). Grammatical gender in bilingual Norwegian–Russian acquisition: the role of input and transparency. Bilingualism: Language and cognition, 20(1), 197–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, L. R., & Hudson, J. A. (1991). Tell me a make-believe story: coherence and cohesion in young children's picture-elicited narratives. Developmental Psychology, 27, 960–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stenson, N. (1981). Studies in Irish syntax (Vol. 8). Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Thomas, E. M., & Gathercole, V. C. M. (2007). Children's productive command of grammatical gender and mutation in Welsh: an alternative to rule-based learning. First Language, 27, 251–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, E. M., Williams, N., Jones, L. A., Davies, S., & Binks, H. (2014). Acquiring complex structures under minority language conditions: bilingual acquisition of plural morphology in Welsh. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17(3), 478–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thordardottir, E. (2014). The typical development of simultaneous bilinguals. In Grüter, T. & Paradis, J. (Eds.), Input and experience in bilingual development (Trends in Language Acquisition Research (TiLAR), 13) (pp. 141–60). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: a usage-based approach to language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S. (2013). Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: the case of Dutch gender. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 86–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wechsler, D. (2002). The Wechsler Primary and Preschool Scale of Intelligence – Third Edition UK (WPPSI-IIIUK). San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar
Weisleder, A., & Fernald, A. (2013). Talking to children matters: early language experience strengthens processing and builds vocabulary. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2143–52.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Supplementary material: PDF

Antonijevic et al. supplementary material

Antonijevic et al. supplementary material

Download Antonijevic et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 2 MB