Age of acquisition and proficiency as factors in language production: Agreement in bilinguals

Abstract

Research on the production of subject–verb number agreement in monolinguals suggests differences between and within languages in how it proceeds as a function of morphological richness. When agreement morphology is relatively rich, the influence of conceptual number over grammatical number is less than when it is relatively poor. Within the framework of Eberhard, Cutting and Bock's (2005) marking and morphing account of agreement production, this finding is explained by how number features from the syntax and the lexicon are reconciled. This study asks: (1) Can this account of differences in agreement production as a function of morphological richness be extended to the case of bilinguals? (2) Do age of acquisition and/or proficiency modulate whether these differences surface in bilinguals? Agreement production was examined in early and late English–Spanish, and late Spanish–English bilinguals of varying proficiency. Higher-proficiency bilinguals patterned similarly to monolinguals, supporting the extension of the marking and morphing account.

Native Language Influence on the Distributive Effect in Producing Second Language Subject–Verb Agreement

“…This means that the sensitivity of the participants to the conceptual number of the subject is restricted by their proficiency level. Foote (2010) also investigated the distributive effect in English-Spanish and Spanish-English bilinguals and observed a distributive effect in the native language of the participants, which corroborates what Hoshino et al (2010) found. However, Foote (2010) observed a distributive effect in L2 not only in participants with higher proficiency but also in those with intermediate proficiency.…”

“…Participant group was a between-subjects factor; match and distributivity were within-subjects factors. Materials were chosen from the studies of Foote (2010) and Hoshino, Dussias, and Kroll (2010). Forty-eight English phrase pairs were selected, each of which was composed of a head noun and a prepositional phrase, and each pair included SP and SS conditions.…”

“…A comparison of Hoshino et al's (2010) and Foote (2010) showed that stimuli were presented in different ways in the two studies. Hoshino et al (2010) used a traditional sentence completion task, in which participants were asked to repeat aloud a noun phase presented and finish it as a complete sentence.…”

A Comparison of the Grammatical Production of Child Heritage Speakers of Spanish across Language and Grade: Kindergarten and Grade 1

“…Similar to previous research HSs with early onset of bilingualism produced more responses in the home language, L1 Spanish, regardless of structure [16,[58][59][60]. Progressives were significantly more accurate in L1 Spanish, which did not support the hypothesis that young HSs would be more productive with the English progressive form due to semantic differences in progressive use in the two languages.…”

Linguistic and narrative development in a Japanese–English bilingual's first language acquisition: a 14-year longitudinal case study

“…Though an error, it may be more like the acquisition of a native-like form of interactional grammar. Errors in SV (subject-verb) agreement are generally attributed to low proficiency (Foote 2010;Hoshino, Dussias, and Kroll 2010), but that does not seem to be a reasonable cause here, considering M's high accuracy rate exhibited all the way through from 97.6% at 4;09 to 99.6% at 18;00, as indicated by the accuracy rate in Table 3.…”