Early emergence of syntactic awareness and cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children’s judgments

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20507640
AutoresCassandra Foursha-Stevenson (Mount Royal University), Elena Nicoladis (0000-0002-5065-9159, University of Alberta)
Ano2011
Volume15
Fascículo4
Páginas521-534
Data de publicação2011-12-01
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoInternational Journal of Bilingualism (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1367-0069 • E-ISSN: 1756-6878
EditoraSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1367006911425818
OpenAlexW2137537658
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas13
Referências citadas43

Bilingual children sometimes perform better than same-aged monolingual children on metalinguistic awareness tasks, such as a grammaticality judgment. Some of these differences can be attributed to bilinguals having to learn to control attention to language choice. This study tested the hypothesis that bilingual children, as young as preschool age, would score overall higher than monolingual children on a grammaticality judgment test. French–English bilingual preschoolers judged the acceptability of three constructions in French and English (i.e. adjective–noun ordering, obligatoriness of a determiner, and object pronoun placement). Their performance was compared with that of a group of age-matched English monolinguals. The results showed that the bilingual children scored higher than the monolingual children. These results demonstrate that syntactic awareness develops quite early for bilinguals. Additionally, the bilingual children demonstrated cross-linguistic influence of core syntactic structure in French, as their judgments were affected by English acceptability

Adjective · Agreement · Determiner · Grammar · Grammaticality · Linguistics · Metalinguistic awareness · Neuroscience of multilingualism · Noun · Pronoun · Language Development and Disorders · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development