Acquisition of complement clitics and tense morphology in internationally adopted children acquiring French

Abstract

The present study examined the language development of children adopted from China to examine possible early age effects with respect to their use of complement clitics, lexical diversity and verb morphology. We focused on these aspects of French because they distinguish second language learners of French and native French-speaking children with language impairment from children learning French as a native language and, in the case of object clitics and certain verb tenses, are relatively late to emerge in native speakers. Thus, it might be expected that they would be susceptible to the delayed onset of acquisition of French experienced by internationally adopted children. Language samples of twelve adopted children from 3;6 to 4;8 living in French-speaking families were analyzed and compared to those of non-adopted monolingual French-speaking children of the same age, sex and socio-economic status. The adopted and control children had similar levels of socio-emotional adjustment and non-verbal intellectual abilities. The adopted children exhibited accelerated language development in general, and there were no significant differences between the internationally adopted and control children with respect to lexical diversity and verb tense. However, the adopted children made significantly more errors using complement clitics, and in particular object clitics, compared to the non-adopted children. The results are discussed in terms of possible effects related to delayed age of acquisition of French.

Language Development in Internationally Adopted Children: A Special Case of Early Second Language Learning

“…In our third assessment, we will also examine more specific aspects of their French language development to pinpoint the precise areas of strengths and weaknesses. In fact, in a separate analysis of the present IA children’s oral narrative language skills (see Gauthier & Genesee, in press), we have preliminary evidence that the IA children are prone to have more difficulty in the use of complement clitics, including object clitics, than native speakers. The acquisition and use of object clitics are difficult for second language learners and children with specific language impairment who are learning French (Paradis, 2004).…”

Object clitics and their omission in child L2 French: The contributions of processing limitations and L1 transfer

“…There is general agreement among those who study the acquisition of Romance languages, and many of those who have tried to learn one, that object clitic constructions are particularly difficult to master. In the case of French, this appears to be true for all learner populations that have been investigated, including monolingual first language learners (Hamann, Rizzi & Frauenfelder, 1996;Jakubowicz & Rigaut, 2000), bilingual first language learners (Müller, Crysmann & Kaiser, 1996;Müller & Hulk, 2001;Pérez-Leroux, Pirvulescu & Roberge, 2009), internationally adopted children (Gauthier, Genesee & Kasparian, 2011), children with Specific Language Impairment (Jakubowicz, Nash, Rigaut & Gérard, 1998;Paradis, 2004), as well as child and adult second language (L2) learners (Herschensohn, 2004;White, 1996). Protracted development of object clitic constructions has also been observed in learners of other Romance languages, including Italian (Bottari, Cipriani & Chilosi, 2000;Tedeschi, 2009) and Spanish (e.g., Bedore & Leonard, 2001;Castilla & Pérez-Leroux, 2010).…”

A Longitudinal Study of Language and Speech in Children Who Were Internationally Adopted at Different Ages

“…Other researchers have noted subtle differences in the syntactic and grammatical abilities of internationally adopted children who are otherwise proficient in their new language (Delcenserie et al, 2013;Gauthier et al, 2012). French Canadian children who were adopted from China performed as well as age-matched controls on expressive measures of tense morphology and lexical diversity.…”

“…However, by school age, language tasks that involve memory and executive functions such as following complex directions are a noted area of relative weakness for some internationally adopted children whose language performance in all other areas is average (Desmarais, Roeber, Smith, & Pollak, 2012;Eigsti et al, 2011). In addition, complex syntactic and grammatical expressive forms are more difficult for internationally adopted children to use proficiently (Delcenserie, Genesee, & Gauthier, 2013;Gauthier, Genesee, & Kasparian, 2012).…”