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Learning to think for speaking about space in child bilingualism
Abstract
An unresolved question in early child bilingualism research concerns the extent to which the acquisition of semantic and conceptual domains is affected by age of onset. This paper compares how reference to caused motion events (Talmy 2000) is acquired in French by early successive and simultaneous bilingual children. Elicited event verbalizations reveal that both bilingual groups diverge considerably from monolingual children and manifest response tendencies mid-way between English and French monolinguals. The effect of age of onset is outweighed by language-specific factors that give rise to convergence strategies. This result is argued to be motivated by the lack of transparency associated with the French system and the partial overlap with English.
... Relevant research on bilingual speakers concerned the extent to which they think for speaking in language-specific ways, and whether, to what extent and why there is crosslinguistic influence (CLI), defined as the overuse of morphosyntactic structures in bilinguals' one language under the influence of the other language (Serratrice, 2013). Regardless of whether it is simultaneous child bilinguals (Engemann, 2021;Miller et al., 2018) or successive child (Aktan-Erciyes, 2020; Aktan-Erciyes et al., 2020;Aveledo & Athanasopoulos, 2016;Engemann, 2016) or adult bilinguals (Daller et al., 2011;Hohenstein et al., 2006), the general understanding is that bilinguals largely follow language-specific lexicalisation patterns, but they also exhibit CLI. To illustrate, studies almost always involved one V-language and one S-language and, compared to monolinguals, bilinguals displayed in-between encoding tendencies where they used more Manner verbs in their V-language and more Path verbs in their S-language. ...
... To illustrate, studies almost always involved one V-language and one S-language and, compared to monolinguals, bilinguals displayed in-between encoding tendencies where they used more Manner verbs in their V-language and more Path verbs in their S-language. The dimension of bilingual speakers' semantic density, especially with respect to how it is affected by CLI, is not well-understood, but preliminary evidence suggests that child bilinguals' semantic density in the V-language can be augmented under the influence of the S-language, although this implicates the use of target-deviant lexicalisation patterns (Engemann, 2016). ...
... The above-mentioned studies have undoubtedly improved our understanding of bilingual expression of motion, but most of them included a V-language and an S-language that were genetically related (Aveledo & Athanasopoulos, 2016;Engemann, 2016;Hohenstein et al., 2006) while a better appreciation of the role of language-specific factors in bilingual language acquisition calls for more diverse language pairings (Serratrice, 2013;Yip & Matthews, 2022). Additionally, most of the studies involved adult bilinguals while those on children tended not to include many age groups. ...
This study explores the implications of Talmy's (2000) motion event typology and its subsequent articulations in relation to Slobin's (1996, 2006) thinking-for-speaking hypothesis for the early successive bilingual acquisition of Uyghur (verb-framed) and Mandarin Chinese (equipollently-framed). Specifically, it examines how 4-, 6-, 8- and 10-year-old bilingual children acquire motion expressions in their L1 and L2 respectively, and how cross-linguistic influence shapes their L2 acquisition process. Results show that, in their L1 Uyghur, bilinguals follow general developmental trajectories observed for children acquiring verb-framed languages. While sensitive to the equipollent Chinese system from early on, due to L1 and other factors, bilinguals fully converge on the Chinese pattern only at age 10, a feat in place in monolinguals from age 3. Our findings highlight that bilingual children do eventually come to develop language-specific thinking-for-speaking patterns in their L2, but they traverse a distinct developmental path.
... Hendriks et al., 2008vs.Hendriks & Hickmann, 2011 and simultaneous bilingualism (cf. Engemann, 2016Engemann, vs. 2022a does point in this direction. Uyghur-Chinese bilingualism promises to shed further light on this observation because, as is shown in the next section, Uyghur is a systematic V-language while Chinese has a strong verb-framing tendency in the CM domain, and therefore Uyghur-Chinese bilinguals need to confront, in both their languages, the constraints of syntactic packaging strategies that V-language speakers have more generally. ...
... Some key questions in the study of bilingual motion expression have been whether and to what extent the bilingual encodes motion events according to languagespecific lexicalization patterns, as well as whether and why there is CLI. Studies addressing these questions have involved child or adult bilinguals speaking typologically contrasting (English/German vs. French/Spanish/Turkish, e.g., Aktan-Erciyes et al., 2021;Aveledo & Athanasopoulos, 2016;Daller et al., 2011;Engemann, 2016;Hohenstein et al., 2006;Miller et al., 2018) and typologically overlapping languages (English vs. Cantonese, e.g., Wang & Wei, 2021. A recurrent finding has been that, while bilinguals generally describe motion in language-specific ways, they also show CLI: they encode Path more frequently in the verb in their S-language, and Manner in the verb more frequently in their V-language; likewise, they use satellitelike devices more frequently in their V-language but less frequently in their S-language. ...
... There is also some initial evidence that patterns of CLI interact with the semantic properties of the denoted event in a more dynamic fashion. For (Engemann, 2016(Engemann, , 2022b than VM (Engemann, 2022a), and similar patterns have been observed for advanced English learners of L2 French (cf. Hendriks et al., 2008vs. ...
Talmy’s motion event typology has served as a fruitful framework for exploring bilingual cognition and language use. The present study extends this line of research to the bilingualism situation of an underrepresented Turkic language, i.e., Modern Uyghur, and Mandarin Chinese, and it does so by focusing on a relatively understudied type of motion, i.e., caused motion. The two languages are genetically and typologically distinct, and yet they share verb-framing as an important lexicalization pattern in encoding motion. This study, therefore, investigated whether and to what extent this structural overlap contributes to crosslinguistic influence in Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals’ construal of caused motion. Thirty Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals’ verbalizations were analyzed with respect to the number of semantic components expressed and the way they were syntactically packaged. Results were compared with relevant monolingual data, which showed that Uyghur–Chinese adult bilinguals displayed a strong L1 to L2 influence in syntactic packaging by overusing the verb-framed strategy in Mandarin Chinese. However, further comparisons with previous research on Uyghur–Chinese child and adult bilinguals’ motion construal revealed that, while structural overlap is a key factor motivating crosslinguistic influence, a coherent explanation of this phenomenon must consider more general principles of bilingual language processing and use.
... Motion event typology has served as an extremely useful framework for examining bilingual cognition and language use. Two issues that have been at the heart of much research is whether and to what extent bilinguals develop languagespecific patterns of thinking-for-speaking and the role of CLI (e.g., Hohenstein et al., 2006;Daller et al., 2011;Engemann et al., 2012;Aveledo and Athanasopoulos, 2016;Engemann, 2016Engemann, , 2021Miller et al., 2018;Wang and Wei, 2021). The studies have mostly focused on typologically contrasting languages (English vs. French/Spanish) and have involved both child and adult bilinguals. ...
... Thus, bilingual speakers are found to use more Path verbs in their satellite-framed language and more Manner verbs in their verbframed language (cf. Hohenstein et al., 2006;Engemann, 2013;Engemann, 2016;Aveledo and Athanasopoulos, 2016;Miller et al., 2018;Park, 2020). There is also some evidence suggesting that CLI extends to the verbal periphery. ...
... In terms of Manner expression, for example, Spanish-English bilinguals were found to use less Manner modifiers in Spanish (L2 to L1 influence) and in English (L1 to L2 influence) (Hohenstein et al., 2006). As to Path expression, Engemann (2013Engemann ( , 2016 reported that English-French bilingual children consistently express Path in peripheral devices in their French due to influence from English (also see Engemann et al., 2012). Additionally, while the issue regarding the longevity of CLI remains largely unexplored (cf. ...
The study examined the implications of Talmy motion event typology and Slobin’s thinking-for-speaking hypothesis for the context of Uyghur–Chinese early successive bilingualism. Uyghur and Chinese represent genetically distant languages (Turkic vs. Sino-Tibetan) that nonetheless share important framing properties in the motion domain, i.e., verb-framing. This study thus aimed to establish how this structural overlap would inform bilingual speakers’ construal of motion events. Additionally, it sought to offer an “end state” perspective to a previous study on Uyghur–Chinese child bilinguals and to shed light on issues around the longevity of crosslinguistic influence. Thirty adult Uyghur–Chinese early successive bilinguals were invited to describe a set of voluntary motion events (e.g., “a man runs across the road”). Their verbalizations, alongside those from 24 monolingual Uyghur and 12 monolingual Chinese speakers were systematically analyzed with regard to the kind of linguistic devices used to encode key components of motion (main verb vs. other devices), the frequency with which the components are expressed together (Manner + Path) or separately (Path or Manner) and how they are syntactically packaged. The findings show that the bilinguals’ thinking-for-speaking patterns are largely language-specific, with little crosslinguistic influence. A comparison of our findings with previous studies on Uyghur-Chinese child bilinguals revealed no developmental change either in the analyzed aspects of motion descriptions or in patterns of crosslinguistic influence. As such, the findings lend support to accounts that propose crosslinguistic influence to be a developmental phenomenon.
... Previous research on the acquisition of voluntary motion has mainly focused on monolingual acquisition of s-and v-languages and on successive and simultaneous bilingual acquisition of s-and v-languages (e.g. Engemann, 2016;Nicoladis & Brisard, 2002), often contrasting English and French. ...
... English-speaking children systematically express manner and path, although children younger than six tend to give more path-only than manner-only descriptions when encoding a single information component (Ji et al., 2011). French-speaking children mostly focus on path (Hickmann, 2006;Hickmann et al., 2018), or a mixed pattern (Engemann, 2016), unless they do not master the appropriate path verbs and hence, focus on manner (Hickmann, 2006;Hickmann et al., 2008). Allen et al. (2007) found that some elements in v-languages might be more difficult to learn, such as using two verbal clauses to express manner and path. ...
... In a study of monolinguals and five-and seven-year-old successive bilinguals with Turkish (a v-language) as their first and English as their second language, Aktan-Erciyes (2020) suggested that early acquisition of a typologically different L2 has an impact on how motion events are encoded. Engemann (2016) noted that English-French successive and simultaneous bilingual children frequently encoded path outside the main verb and that they did not fully converge with French monolinguals' response patterns, instead showing a preference for satellite-framing. ...
Language in school, leisure time, and working life: Current arenas for Swedish research in applied linguistics
... Note that Miller et al.'s (2018) analysis is based on the overall encoding of path and manner, without distinguishing between verbs and satellites. Our own previous research on the acquisition of caused motion expression in early successive and simultaneous English-French bilingual children (Engemann, 2012(Engemann, , 2016Harr & Engemann, 2011) suggested prolific asymmetric CLI in the opposite direction from what was reported in Miller et al. (2018). Bilinguals' French descriptions showed evidence of pervasive influence from English S-framing strategies, whereas English expressions showed little influence from French. ...
... The scarce evidence available to date on bilingual children is inconclusive and too heterogeneous to allow for meaningful comparisons. It is unclear, for instance, why the two studies on simultaneous English-French bilingual children (Engemann, 2016;Miller et al., 2018) arrived at different results concerning the directionality of CLI. It is possible that the type of motion event described (complex caused versus simple voluntary motion) and the different outcome measures used play a role. ...
... Mixed logit models were fitted with The non-boundary-crossing condition included two targets instead of one because the materials by Hickmann and colleagues (2009b) were designed to test a hypothesised difference between up-and down-trajectories in French, where verbs jointly lexicalising path and manner are available for upward but not for downward motion (e.g., grimper 'to crawl upwards'). 3 These categories were based on our previous findings of target-deviant idiosyncrasies in English-French bilinguals' descriptions of caused motion (Engemann, 2012(Engemann, , 2016. 4 There was no theoretically motivated reason to analyse satellites encoding manner as they are not characteristic of either of the two typological framing strategies. ...
Simultaneous bilingual children sometimes display crosslinguistic influence (CLI), widely attested in the domain of morphosyntax. It remains less clear whether CLI affects bilinguals’ event construal, what motivates its occurrence and directionality, and how developmentally persistent it is. The present study tested predictions generated by the structural overlap hypothesis and the co-activation account in the motion event domain. 96 English–French bilingual children of two age groups and 96 age-matched monolingual English and French controls were asked to describe animated videos displaying voluntary motion events. Semantic encoding in main verbs showed bidirectional CLI. Unidirectional CLI affected French path encoding in the verbal periphery and was predicted by the presence of boundary-crossing, despite the absence of structural overlap. Furthermore, CLI increased developmentally in the French data. It is argued that these findings reflect highly dynamic co-activation patterns sensitive to the requirements of the task and to language-specific challenges in the online production process.
... La prédiction est donc la suivante : on trouvera, en anglo-français, plus qu'en ancien français continental, des traits qui font preuve d'un mode de perception et/ou expression satellite, comme, notamment, les descriptions de déplacements, riche en détails (Cadierno 2004 ;Navarro et Nicolaidis 2006). En outre, partant des travaux de Croft, Barðdal, et Hollmann (2010), Pourcel et Kopecka (2005) et d 'Engemann (2013'Engemann ( , 2016 entre autres, on s'attend à trouver des idiosyncrasies dans l'usage des tournures à cadrage verbal que l'on ne trouve pas dans les textes OF, comme, notamment les constructions à cadrage double et symétrique, voire aussi la satellisation de certaines prépositions. Dans ce qui suit, je présenterai d'abord quelques constructions idiosyncratiques relatives à l'expression du déplacement par les verbes du trajet avant de parler des constructions talmiennes proprement dites concernant des verbes du mode de déplacement. ...
... La satellisation représente un mécanisme d'influence interlinguistique dans lequel certaines prépositions sont utilisées en tant que particule, dans un sens dynamique, et sans qu'elles soient suivies d'un nom. On a remarqué l'usage de prépositions satellisées chez les enfants bilingues (françaisanglais), notamment dans le contexte des événements across (Engemann 2013(Engemann , 2016 11 . Pour ne pas dépasser les limites du présent article, je me borne ici à donner deux exemples pour illustrer mon propos, concernant les prépositions parmi « par » et sur « on ». ...
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In this article I question the characterization of the faus franceis d’Angleterre as a dialect of Medieval French. I do so first of all on grounds of the fact that Anglo-French (AF) was spoken by an extremely heterogeneous group of speakers coming from very different social and linguistic backgrounds. Therefore, one should not use linguistic factors observed in a given author’s text to draw conclusions regarding AF as a whole. While it is generally accepted that the majority of speakers of AF were bilingual, the scenario of bilingualism from birth only applies to a comparatively small portion of the population. I will show that roughly one half of the texts show features suggesting that the author has an L2 French background. As a consequence, the observed phenomena should not be considered dialectal features of AF as a whole, or as language change characterizing AF in general, but rather as idiolectal features in a given author’s L2. Technically, my argument rests on the distribution of several verb-related (morpho)syntactic phenomena, which set AF apart from continental Old French (OF), namely auxiliary selection, use of the pronoun eux, motion-event descriptions and directed motion constructions. My study is corpus-based and utilizes data from the ANHdb (Anglo-Norman Hub database, cf. Schauwecker and Stein 2016) as well as the BFM (Base de français Médiéval, 2016).
Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions
The paper examined whether Uyghur-Chinese early successive bilinguals fully acquire motion event construal characteristic of their L2 Chinese, and how factors such as structural overlap between their two languages (i.e., verb-framing) and path type (i.e., presence or absence of boundary crossing) shape the acquisition process.
Design/Methodology/Approach
Adopting a developmental approach, we included both child and adult bilinguals within a single design. Participants narrated video clips depicting both boundary-crossing and non-boundary-crossing events (i.e., across vs. up/down).
Data and Analysis
The database comprised motion event descriptions of bilinguals representing three age groups (4–6 -year-olds [AG1, no. 48], 8–10 -year-olds [AG2, no. 48], and adult bilinguals [AG3, no. 30]), and Chinese monolinguals (no. 12). Data were analysed in terms of both ‘structural’ (linguistic devices used, and how they were arranged syntactically) and ‘pragmatic’ dimensions of motion expression (how frequently speakers profiled different event components).
Findings/Conclusions
Analyses revealed that bilinguals fully established the ‘structural’ aspects of target system at AG2, but the ‘pragmatic’ aspect became target-like at AG3. Structural overlap led to crosslinguistic influence for non-boundary-crossing events while more general effects of path type manifested only at AG1.
Originality
The paper enriches current research by featuring a non-Western bilingual community. By focusing on a language pair that is distant genealogically (Turkic vs. Sino-Tibetan) and typologically (agglutinative vs. analytic) but shares key structures in expressing motion, it contributes to a better understanding of the role of structural factors in bilingual event construal. Its developmental approach sheds light on both the process and the product of bilingual language acquisition.
Significance/Implications
Our findings confirm that early successive bilinguals can eventually acquire L2-specific patterns of motion construal, but the developmental asymmetry observed between the ‘structural’ and ‘pragmatic’ aspects of motion expression underlines the importance of examining both these aspects for an accurate understanding of bilingual construal of motion events.
Previous decades have seen many studies on the expression of motion in language. Most are based on Talmy's (1985) motion event typology. While providing robust support for the typology, variations within and across typological groups have also been reported, leading to proposals to either expand the typology (Slobin, 2004, Ameka and Essegbey, 2013) or to understand it as a set of strategies that languages avail themselves of (Beavers et al., 2010; Croft et al., 2010). To further contribute to this line of research, this article examines the expression of voluntary motion by adult speakers of a Turkic language, modern Uyghur. Our analyses reveal that Uyghur is a prototypically verb-framed language. It is different from English (considered satellite-framed) at all levels of analysis and is systematic in adopting verb-framed lexicalisation patterns alike Turkish and to a lesser extent French. Our data lend support for Talmy's (2000) typology as conceived in a strategy-based typological framework (Croft et al., 2010; Hendriks & Hickmann, 2015).
The description of motion events in Anglo-French, the variety of Old French that developed in Mediaeval England, differs strikingly from that in continental Old French. These differences can be accounted for by assuming contact influence from s-framed Middle English on (predominantly) v-framed Old French. Based on my investigation of Path verbs (monter, ascendre, descendre, avaler, entrer, sortir, passer) in the Base du Français Médiéval and in the Anglo-Norman Hub database, I observed that: 1. rich Path descriptions occur more often in AF (roughly 10:1). 2. reverse v-framing (Pourcel & Kopecka 2008) does not seem to be attested, whereas pseudo-v-framing constructions, in which both syntactical slots, the main verb as well as the gerundive, express Path only, do occur. This is interesting, because this type of construction virtually does not occur in OF. 3. While satellisation of prepositions (Engemann 2012) is rare and seems to be ideosyncratic, there seem to be certain differences in the way particles are used (e.g. outre).
This study compared the language abilities of simultaneous-bilingual children in German to the abilities of German monolinguals and to the abilities of early second language learners of German. 160 children aged 4;0 to 5;0 years were assessed with the standardized language test Lise-DaZ, testing 11 different language phenomena. The results indicate a unique profile for simultaneous bilinguals. No differences to monolinguals were found for phenomena acquired early in monolingual acquisition of German. Parallels to early second language learners were observed for phenomena acquired late by monolinguals. With regard to language assessment, our findings demonstrate the need for separate norms for simultaneous bilinguals; otherwise misdiagnosis is likely.
Keywords: Age of acquisition, multilingual, monolingual, Lise-Daz, language assessment
Zusammenfassung
Diese Studie untersucht, ob die sprachlichen Fähigkeiten von simultan-bilingualen Kindern eher mit denen monolingualer Kinder oder mit denen früher Zweitsprachlerner vergleichbar sind. 160 Kinder im Alter von 4;0-5;0 Jahren wurden mit dem Sprachtest Lise-DaZ im Hinblick auf verschiedene sprachliche Phänomene des Deutschen untersucht. Die simultan-bilingualen Kinder zeigten ein eigenes Erwerbsprofil. Keine Unterschiede zu monolingualen Kindern bestanden in Phänomenen, die im monolingualen Erwerb früh gemeistert werden, während sich für spät erworbene Phänomene Parallelen zu frühen Zweitsprachlernern zeigten. Bei Verwendung nicht erwerbstypengerechter Normen in der Sprachdiagnostik besteht daher ein hohes Risiko für Fehldiagnosen.
Schlagwörter: Erwerbsalter, mehrsprachig, monolingual, Lise-Daz, Sprachdiagnostik
Research on child bilingualism accounts for differences in the course and the outcomes of monolingual and different types of bilingual language acquisition primarily from two perspectives: age of onset of exposure to the language(s) and the role of the input (Genesee, Paradis, & Crago, 2004; Meisel, 2009; Unsworth et al., 2014). Some findings suggest that early successive bilingual children may pattern similarly to simultaneous bilingual children, passing through different trajectories from child L2 learners due to a later age of onset in the latter group. Studies on bilingual development have also shown that input quantity in bilingual acquisition is considerably reduced, i.e., in each of their two languages, bilingual children are likely exposed to much less input than their monolingual peers (Paradis & Genesee, 1996; Unsworth, 2013b). At the same time, simultaneous bilingual children develop and attain competence in the two languages, sometimes without even an attested age delay compared to monolingual children (Paradis, Genesee & Crago, 2011). The implication is that even half of the input suffices for early language development, at least with respect to ‘core’ aspects of language, in whatever way ‘core’ is defined.
My aim in this article is to consider how an additional, linguistic variable interacts with age of onset and input in bilingual development, namely, the timing in L1 development of the phenomena examined in bilingual children’s performance. Specifically, I will consider timing differences attested in the monolingual development of features and structures, distinguishing between early, late or ‘very late’ acquired phenomena. I will then argue that this three-way distinction reflects differences in the role of narrow syntax: early phenomena are core, parametric and narrowly syntactic, in contrast to late and very late phenomena, which involve syntax-external or even language-external resources too. I explore the consequences of these timing differences in monolingual development for bilingual development. I will review some findings from early (V2 in Germanic, grammatical gender in Greek), late (passives) and very late (grammatical gender in Dutch) phenomena in the bilingual literature and argue that early phenomena can differentiate between simultaneous and (early) successive bilingualism with an advantage for the former group, while the other two reveal similarly (high or low) performance across bilingual groups, differentiating them from monolinguals. The paper proposes that questions about the role of age of onset and language input in early bilingual development can only be meaningfully addressed when the properties and timing of the phenomena under investigation are taken into account.
In this article the authors argue that L1 transfer from English is not only important in the early stages of L2 acquisition of Spanish, but remains influential in later stages if there is not enough positive evidence for the learners to progress in their development (Lefebvre, White, & Jourdan, 2006). The findings are based on analyses of path and manner of movement in stories told by British students of Spanish (N = 68) of three different proficiency levels. Verbs that conflate motion and path, on the one hand, are mastered early, possibly because the existence of Latinate path verbs, such as enter and ascend in English, facilitate their early acquisition by British learners of Spanish. Contrary to the findings of Cadierno (2004) and Cadierno and Ruiz (2006), the encoding of manner, in particular in boundary crossing contexts, seems to pose enormous difficulties, even among students who had been abroad on a placement in a Spanish-speaking country prior to the data collection. An analysis of the frequency of manner verbs in Spanish corpora shows that one of the key reasons why students struggle with manner is that manner verbs are so infrequent in Spanish. The authors claim that scarce positive evidence in the language exposed to and little or no negative evidence are responsible for the long-lasting effect of transfer on the expression of manner.
This experimental study investigates event construal by early Dutch-German bilinguals, as reflected in their oral depiction of everyday events shown in video clips. The starting point is the finding that the expression of an aspectual perspective (progressive aspect), and its consequences for event construal, is dependent on the extent to which means are grammaticalized, as in English (e.g., progressive aspect) or not, as in German (von Stutterheim & Carroll, 2006). The present study shows that although speakers of Dutch and German have comparable means to mark this aspectual concept, at a first glance at least, they differ markedly both in the contexts as well as in the extent to which this aspectual perspective is selected, being highly frequent in specific contexts in Dutch, but not in German. The present experimental study investigates factors that lead to the use of progressive aspect by early bilinguals, using video clips (with different types of events varied along specific dimensions on a systematic basis). The study includes recordings of eye movements, and examines how far an aspectual perspective drives allocation of attention during information intake while viewing the stimulus material, both for and while speaking. Although the bilinguals have acquired the means to express progressive aspect in Dutch, their use shows a pattern that differs from monolingual Dutch speakers. Interestingly, these differences are reflected in different patterns in the direction of attention (eye movements) when verbalizing information on events.
This study examines the impact of typological properties (satellite - vs. verb-framed languages) on the expression of caused motion during adult second language acquisition. Productions were elicited by means of animated cartoons from 24 English learners of French (12 low-intermediate, 12 advanced) as compared to 24 native speakers (12 English, 12 French). The responses of native speakers differed with respect to semantic density (English>French) and to the systematic (English) vs. variable (French) devices used. As for learners, their utterance density increased with proficiency level as they acquired complex structures. Source/target language properties influenced this process, as shown by their increasing attempt to produce target-like structures that nonetheless remained source-like at both proficiency levels. These typological constraints suggest that learners do not construct an entirely independent linguistic system during second language acquisition and that L2 mastery may require some re-conceptualization of spatial information. The discussion indicates research directions that might explore the implications of these results for language teaching.
This study reports on a comparison of the use and knowledge of tense-marking morphemes in English by first language (L1), second language (L2) and specifically language-impaired (SLI) children. The objective of our research was to ascertain whether the L2 children's tense acquisition patterns were similar or dissimilar to those of the L1 and SLI groups, and whether they would fit an (Extended) Optional Infinitive profile, or an L2-based profile, e.g., the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. Results showed that the L2 children had a unique profile compared with their monolingual peers, which was better characterized by the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. At the same time, results reinforce the assumption underlying the (Extended) Optional Infinitive profile that internal constraints on the acquisition of tense could be a component of L1 development, with and without SLI.
Recent years have seen a revolution in our knowledge of how children learn to think and speak. In this volume, leading scholars from these rapidly evolving fields of research examine the relationship between child language acquisition and cognitive development. At first sight, advances in the two areas seem to have moved in opposing directions: the study of language acquisition has been especially concerned with diversity, explaining how children learn languages of widely different types, while the study of cognitive development has focused on uniformity, clarifying how children build on fundamental, presumably universal concepts. This book brings these two vital strands of investigation into close dialogue, suggesting a synthesis in which the process of language acquisition may interact with early cognitive development. It provides empirical contributions based on a variety of languages, populations and ages, and theoretical discussions that cut across the disciplines of psychology, linguistics and anthropology.
The thesis explores the implications of Talmy’s typology of motion expression (Talmy 1985, 2000a,b) for bilingual first language acquisition of English (satellite-framing) and French (verb-framing), addressing the following question: How does the expression of motion develop in simultaneous bilingual children in comparison to monolinguals? The particular focus of this study is on the role of crosslinguistic interactions and the extent to which their occurrence and directionality are affected by language-specific properties, children’s age and the factor of task complexity. The thesis pursues two goals. First, it aims to contribute to the growing understanding of the role of languagespecific factors in the acquisition process (e.g. Allen et al. 2007, Choi and Bowerman 1991, Hickmann et al. 2009a). Secondly, by testing various proposals regarding crosslinguistic interactions (Gawliĵek-Maiwald and Tracy 1996, Müller and Hulk 2001, Toribio 2004), it endeavours to shed light on bilingual speech production processes. Oral event descriptions elicited by means of short video clips from bilingual and monolingual children aged 4 to 10 years are analysed and compared across two production tasks of varying semantic complexity: a simpler voluntary motion task, showing agents performing spontaneous movements along various paths, and a more complex caused motion task, portraying a human agent causing the displacement of various objects in different manners along various paths. Bilinguals’ event descriptions are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively in relation to monolingual English and French control groups across various aspects of verbalisation: (i) the linguistic devices used for information encoding (information packaging), (ii) the number of information components expressed (semantic density), and (iii) their syntactic complexity and compactness (utterance architecture). The results indicate both parallels and differences to monolingual performance patterns. Although bilinguals’ event descriptions generally follow the typological tendencies characterising monolinguals’ English and French verbalisation tendencies, they also exhibit significant departures from the monolingual range in both languages, at all tested ages and in both production tasks. However, these differences are most prominent in children’s French and in the caused motion task. In this context, bilinguals display a striking preference for satellite-framing encoding options, resulting both in the overuse of crosslinguistically overlapping packaging strategies and in qualitatively idiosyncratic extensions of French locative satellites. Syntactically, bilinguals show a strong tendency to use compact and simple structures (lacking subordination) compared to French monolinguals. An unexpected finding concerns the occurrence of a number of divergent production phenomena that are shared by bilinguals’ productions in both languages and tasks, and suggest a bilingual-specific pattern of use. The findings are discussed in the context of recent proposals regarding crosslinguistic interactions in simultaneous bilingualism. The persistence of bilingual-specific effects even at age 10 suggests that cross-linguistic interactions characterise bilinguals’ verbal behaviour throughout language development. This supports the notion that the bilingual is a unique speaker-hearer in his own right (Grosjean 1985, 2008). With regard to the impact of typological and general determinants, the findings indicate that bilinguals’ verbalisation choices are guided by a complex interplay of event-specific factors and the perceived overlap of language-specific properties of both languages.
The aim of this chapter is to outline very briefly the rationale underlying the research enterprise on bilingual first language acquisition, some results of which will be presented in the following chapters. I will attempt to explain the fundamental research interests which motivate our study, beyond the analysis of particular grammatical phenomena. To avoid a possible misunderstanding: explaining one's interests is not equivalent to justifying them. This would require a state-of-the-art description of the research on first language acquisition and partly also a description of the theory of grammar, a task far beyond the scope of the present chapter.
The coming of language occurs at about the same age in every healthy child throughout the world, strongly supporting the concept that genetically determined processes of maturation, rather than environmental influences, underlie capacity for speech and verbal understanding. Dr. Lenneberg points out the implications of this concept for the therapeutic and educational approach to children with hearing or speech deficits.
Typological analyses (Talmy 2000) show that languages vary a great deal in how they package and distribute spatial information by lexical and grammatical means. Recent developmental research suggests that children's language acquisition is constrained by such typological properties from an early age on, but the relative role of such constraints in language and cognitive development is still much debated (Bowerman 2007; Bowerman and Choi, 2003; Slobin 1996, 2003a, 2003b, 2006). In the context of this debate, we compare the expression of motion in two data bases of child English vs. French: 1) experimentally induced productions about caused motion (adults and children of three to ten years); 2) spontaneous productions about varied types of motion events during earlier phases of acquisition (18 months to three years). The results of both studies show that the density of information about motion increases with age in both languages, particularly after the age of five years. However, they also show striking cross-linguistic differences. At all ages the semantic density of utterances about motion is higher in English than in French. English speakers systematically use compact structures to express multiple types of information (typically MANNER and CAUSE in main verbs, PATH in other devices). French speakers rely more on verbs and/or distribute information in more varied ways across parts of speech. The discussion highlights the joint impact of cognitive and typological factors on language acquisition, and raises questions to be addressed in further research concerning the relation between language and cognition during development.
This study investigates the combined effects of Age of Onset of Acquisition (AOA) and quality and quantity of input on the development of three grammatical structures in French. In a longitudinal and multiple case study including successive (L2) Swedish-French bilingual children (n = 3), simultaneous (2L1) Swedish-French bilingual children (n = 3) and monolingual French children (n = 3), we examine the development of finite verb forms, object pronouns and subject-verb agreement. A distinction is made between structures that are early/late in different modes of acquisition and less/more difficult. The operationalization of quantity and quality of input is based on individual input profiles. The results show that AOA affects the development of less difficult and early grammatical structures whereas AOA has no influence on more difficult structures that are acquired late. An effect of input is found in the 2L1 children, and in some of the L2 children. This effect is most clear with more difficult and late structures.
It has been argued that the study of child L2 development can inform different maturational accounts of language acquisition. One such specific proposal was put forward by Meisel (2008), arguing for a cut-off point for monolingual or bilingual first language acquisition — (2)L1 — type of development at 3–4 years. The paper analyses the longitudinal development of object clitics in child L2 French (L1 Swedish) and compares the developmental sequence in child L2 learners (n = 7) with different Ages of Onset of Acquisition (AoA) (from 3;0 to 6;5) to the adult L2 sequence that was found in previous studies (Granfeldt & Schlyter 2004). The study also includes age-matched simultaneous bilingual children (n = 3) and monolingual controls (n = 5). The results show that some of the child L2 learners with an AoA over 4 years display structures that are typical of adult L2 acquisition, whereas these structures were not found in the simultaneous bilingual children or in the child second language acquisition (cL2) children with an AoA under 4 years. It is suggested that differences in developmental sequences are due to a combination of AoA and the level of L1 linguistic development at the onset of L2 acquisition.
Available research (Bowerman & Choi, 2003; Slobin, 1996) shows crosslinguistic differences in how children talk about space, suggesting the impact of languagespecific factors on language acquisition. This study compares the productions of French children aged 3, 4 and 5 years (N = 60) with those of French and English adults (N = 40) in two tasks that required them to locate objects and to describe object displacements. French adults frequently rely on verbs and focus on manner of attachment, whereas English adults frequently rely on satellites and focus on posture or manner of displacement. French children show few age differences between 3 and 5 years, generally following the French pattern from 3 years on, although they also differ from both groups of adults in some respects, showing developmental changes (overgeneralizations in prepositional use, expansion of the verbal lexicon). The discussion highlights the impact of language-specific determinants of acquisition in relation to the typological properties of French and English as verb-framed vs. satellite-framed languages. It is argued that languages invite speakers to rely on different linguistic means (information locus) and to pay attention to different types of information (information focus), thereby inducing different ways of organizing underlying spatial categories.
This book dispels many myths about dual language development and answers key questions that might arise as you work with children and their parents. Student profiles, definitions of key terms, and "clinical implications" sections for selected chapters make this a valuable reference for in-practice SLPs and educators, an accessible resource for parents, and an ideal textbook for graduate students. As teachers work with bilingual children and second language learners, they will find this book gives them the clear information they need to make critical decisions. Following a series preface and a foreword, this book is divided into three sections. The first section, Foundations, presents the initial chapters in the book: (1) Introduction; (2) Language and Culture; and (3) The Language-Cognition Connection. The second section, Understanding Bilingual and Second Language Acquisition, contains chapters (4) Bilingual First Language Acquisition; (5) Bilingual Code-Mixing; (6) Second Language Acquisition in Children; and (7) Schooling in a Second Language. Finally, the third section, Diagnosis and Intervention, concludes the book with the remaining chapter: (8) Assessment and Intervention for Children with Dual Language Disorders. A glossary and index are also included.
In English, manner-of-motion verbs (walk, run) and directed motion
verbs (go) can appear with a prepositional phrase that expresses a goal (goal PP) as in John
walked
(ran,
went)
to
school. In contrast, Japanese allows only directed motion
verbs to occur with a goal PP. Thus, English allows a wider range of motion verbs to occur with
goal PPs than Japanese does. Learnability considerations, then, lead me to hypothesize that
Japanese learners will learn manner-of-motion verbs with goal PPs in English from positive
evidence, whereas English learners will have difficulty learning that manner-of-motion verbs with
goal PPs are impossible in Japanese because nothing in the input will tell them so. Forty-two
intermediate Japanese learners of English and 21 advanced English learners of Japanese were
tested using a grammaticality judgment task with pictures. Results support this prediction and
provide a new piece of evidence for the previous findings indicating that L1 influence persists
when an argument structure in the L2 constitutes a subset of its counterpart in the L1.
In introducing this special issue of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , we feel it is critical to clarify what we understand ‘linguistic convergence’ to mean in the context of bilingualism, since ‘convergence’ is a technical term more readily associated with the field of language contact than with the field of bilingualism (for recent discussions of the role of convergence in contact see Thomason and Kaufman, 1988; Thomason, 2001; Myers-Scotton, 2002; Clyne, 2003; Winford, 2003). Within the language contact literature, the term invites a variety of uses. Some researchers adopt a definition of convergence that requires that all languages in a contact situation change, sometimes to the extent that the source of a given linguistic feature cannot be determined (see April McMahon's commentary in this issue). For others, convergence may be more broadly defined to also apply to situations in which one language has undergone structural incursions of various sorts from contact with another.
The purpose of this article was to test the predictions of a speech production model of cross-linguistic influence in French–English bilingual children. A speech production model predicts bidirectional influence (i.e., bilinguals’ greater use of periphrastic constructions like the hat of the dog relative to monolinguals in English and reversed possessive constructions like *chien chapeau to refer to a dog's hat). In contrast, other explanations predict unidirectional influence from French to English. Possessive constructions were elicited from preschool French–English bilingual children as well as preschool French and English monolinguals within the same age range. The results showed bidirectional influence, consistent with a speech production model.
Learning to talk about motion in a foreign language
- T Cadierno
A Portrait of the Young in the New Multilingual Spain. Issues in the Acquisition of two or more Languages in Multilingual Environments
- E Álvarez
Motion expression in French. Typological diversity. Durham and Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics
- S Pourcel
- A Kopecka
Bilingualismus in der frühen Kindheit
- R Tracy
- I Gawlitzek-Maiwald