Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:12:52.164Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bilingual children's acquisition of the past tense: a usage-based approach*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2010

JOHANNE PARADIS ,
ELENA NICOLADIS ,
MARTHA CRAGO  and
FRED GENESEE
JOHANNE PARADIS*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
ELENA NICOLADIS
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
MARTHA CRAGO
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
FRED GENESEE
Affiliation:
McGill University
*
Address for correspondence: Johanne Paradis, Associate Professor, 4-46 Assiniboia Hall, Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E7, Canada. tel: 1 (780) 492-0805; fax: 1 (780) 492-0806; web: www.ualberta.ca/~jparadis/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Bilingual and monolingual children's (mean age=4;10) elicited production of the past tense in both English and French was examined in order to test predictions from Usage-Based theory regarding the sensitivity of children's acquisition rates to input factors such as variation in exposure time and the type/token frequency of morphosyntactic structures. Both bilingual and monolingual children were less accurate with irregular than regular past tense forms in both languages. Bilingual children, as a group, were less accurate than monolinguals with the English regular and irregular past tense, and with the French irregular past tense, but not with the French regular past tense. However, bilingual children were as accurate as monolinguals with the past tense in their language of greater exposure, except for English irregular verbs. It is argued that these results support the view that children's acquisition rates are sensitive to input factors, but with some qualifications.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , June 2011 , pp. 554 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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.)

Footnotes

[*]

We would like to thank Heather Golberg and Aimée Berubé for their help in collecting and transcribing the data. This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for which we are grateful (standard research grant #410-2006-0104 to Johanne Paradis, and official languages grant #858-2004-0012 to Martha Crago).

References

REFERENCES

Bassano, D., Laaha, S., Maillochon, I. & Dressler, W. (2004). Early acquisition of verb grammar and lexical development: Evidence from periphrastic constructions in French and Austrian German. First Language 24, 33–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bescherelle, (1996). L'art de conjuguer. Québec: Éditions Hurtubise, Ltée.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. (1995). Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 10, 425–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (2001). Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (2002). Phonological evidence for exemplar storage of multiword sequences. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24, 215–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. (2008). Usage-based grammar and second language acquisition. In Robinson, P. & Ellis, N. (eds), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition, 216–36. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. (1985). The acquisition of Romance, with special reference to French. In Slobin, D. (ed.), The cross-linguistic study of language acquisition, vol. I: The data, 687–782. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences, 2nd edn.Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. M. (2007). Miami and North Wales, so far and yet so near: A constructivist account of morpho-syntactic development in bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 10, 224–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. M. & Hoff, E. (2007). Input and acquisition of language: Three questions. In Hoff, E. & Shatz, M. (eds), The handbook of language development, 107–127. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V., Sebastián, E. & Soto, P. (1999). The early acquisition of Spanish verbal morphology: Across-the-board or piecemeal knowledge? International Journal of Bilingualism 3, 133–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. M. & Thomas, E. M. (2005). Minority language survival: Input factors influencing the acquisition of Welsh. In Cohen, J., McAlister, K. T., Rolstad, K. and MacSwan, J. (eds), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, 852–74. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Gutiérrez-Clellen, V., Simon-Cereijido, G. & Wagner, C. (2008). Bilingual children with language impairment: A comparison with monolinguals and second language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics 29, 3–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jakubowicz, C. & Nash, L. (2001). Functional categories and syntactic operations in (ab)normal language acquisition. Brain and Language 77, 321–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2008). Children's first language acquisition from a usage-based perspective. In Robinson, P. & Ellis, N. (eds), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition, 216–36. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Marchman, V. & Bates, E. (1994). Continuity in lexical and morphological development: A test of the critical mass hypothesis. Journal of Child Language 21, 339–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marchman, V., Martínez-Sussman, C. & Dale, P. (2004). The language-specific nature of grammatical development: Evidence from bilingual language learners. Developmental Science 7, 212–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marcus, G., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J. & Xu, Fei (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (serial no. 228, 57(4)).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McClelland, J. L. & Patterson, K. (2002). Rules or connections in past-tense inflections: What does the evidence rule out? Trends in Cognitive Science 6, 465–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nicoladis, E., Palmer, A. & Marentette, P. (2007). The role of type and token frequency in using past tense morphemes correctly. Developmental Science 10, 237–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nicoladis, E. & Paradis, J. (in press). Acquiring past tense morphemes in English and French: Evidence from bilingual children. Language Learning.Google Scholar
Oetting, J. & Horohov, J. (1997). Past-tense marking by children with and without specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 40, 62–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
O'Grady, W. (2008). The emergentist program. Lingua 118, 447–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. (2010). Bilingual children's acquisition of English verb morphology: Effects of language exposure, structure complexity, and task type. Language Learning 60(3).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. & Crago, M. (2001). The morphosyntax of Specific Language Impairment in French: Evidence for an Extended Optional Default Account. Language Acquisition 9, 269–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J., Crago, M. & Genesee, F. (2005/2006). Domain-specific versus domain-general theories of the deficit in SLI: Object pronoun acquisition by French–English bilingual children. Language Acquisition 13(1), 33–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. & Genesee, F. (1996). Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or interdependent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18, 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. & Genesee, F. (1997). On continuity and the emergence of functional categories in bilingual first language acquisition. Language Acquisition 6(2), 91–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Pirvulescu, M. & Roberge, Y. (2009). Bilingualism as a window into the language faculty: The acquisition of objects in French-speaking children in bilingual and monolingual contexts. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12, 97–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S. & Ullman, M. (2002). The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Science 6, 456–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pizzuto, E. & Caselli, M. C. (1994). The acquisition of Italian morphology: Implications for models of language development. Journal of Child Language 19, 491–557.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rice, M. L. & Wexler, K. (2001). Test of Early Grammatical Impairment: Examiner's manual. San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar
Rochet, B. (1994). Le français à l'ouest de l'ontario [French west of Ontario]. In Poirier, C. (ed.), Langue, espace, société: Le variétés du français en Amérique du Nord [Language, space and society: The varieties of French in North America]. Sainte-Foy, QC: Presses de l'Université Laval.Google Scholar
Royle, P. & Thordardottir, E. (2008). Elicitation of the passé composé in French preschoolers with and without specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 29, 341–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M. & Tomasello, M. (2003). The role of input in the acquisition of third person singular verbs in English. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 46, 863–77.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thordardottir, E. (2005). Early lexical and syntactic development in Quebec French and English: Implications for cross-linguistic and bilingual assessment. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders 40, 243–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thordardottir, E., Rothenberg, A., Rivard, M. E. & Naves, R. (2006). Bilingual assessment: Can overall proficiency be estimated from separate measurement of two languages? Journal of Multilingual Communication Disorders 4, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Walker, D. (2005). Le français dans l'Ouest canadien [French in the Canadian West]. In Valdman, A., Auger, J. & Piston-Halten, D. (eds), Le français en Amérique du nord: état présent [French in North America: The current state]. Sainte-Foy, QC: Presses de l'Université Laval.Google Scholar