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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/
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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.

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

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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).

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