Bilingual children's sensitivity to specificity and genericity: Evidence from metalinguistic awareness

Abstract

A number of recent studies have argued that bilingual children's language comprehension and production may be affected by cross-linguistic influence. The overall aim of this study was to investigate whether the ability to judge the grammaticality of a construction in one language is affected by knowledge of the corresponding construction in the other language. We investigated how English–Italian and Spanish–Italian bilingual children and monolingual peers judged the grammaticality of plural NPs in specific and generic contexts in English and in Italian. We also explored whether language of the community, age, and the typological relatedness of the bilinguals’ two languages significantly affected their performance. While performance in English was overall poor, no significant differences existed between the English–Italian bilinguals and the monolinguals. In contrast, we found that knowledge of English affected the bilinguals’ ability to discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in Italian. The English–Italian bilinguals were significantly less accurate than both the monolinguals and the Spanish–Italian bilinguals in a task where they simply had to rely on the local definite article cue to reject ungrammatical bare plurals in generic contexts. Language of the community and age also played a significant role in children's accuracy.

The development of determiners in the context of French–English bilingualism: a study of cross-linguistic influence

“…production of definite before indefinite articles; no equal distribution of definite and indefinite articles by 2;6 (see Prévost, 2009 Unlike in previous corpus studies of determiner development (Kupisch, 2003;, we report a small number of instances of cross-linguistic transfers. As in experiments with older bilinguals (Serratrice et al, 2009;Kupisch & Pierantozzi, 2010), these instances occurred from the Germanic language, i.e. English, to the Romance language, i.e.…”

“…On the contrary, if language exposure plays a role on the magnitude of CLI (Serratrice, et al 2009), then comparable direction and amplitude of CLI should be observed given our bilinguals' comparable exposure to French and English.…”

“…A few studies have shown that the simultaneous acquisition of determiners in a Romance-Germanic language pair is vulnerable to CLI (Granfeldt, 2000;Hulk, 2004;Kupisch, 2003;Serratrice et al, 2009). CLI may occur (i) from the Romance to the Germanic language as an early convergence on the target use of determiners in the Germanic language and/or transfer in the use of a definite article in generic contexts (e.g.…”

“…Serratrice et al (2009) examined the effect of structural complexity, typological relatedness, the language of the homecountry, and age on the CLI of determiners in English-Italian and Spanish-Italian bilinguals between 6;2-10;10. In Italian, response accuracy was at ceiling for the monolingual adults and children, and for the Italian-Spanish children.…”

Mass-count distinction in Chinese-English bilingual students

“…Much research on the morphosyntax-semantics mapping has been done in the aspectual domain. In the nominal realm, bilingual/second language acquisition research has mostly focused on the semantics of the article system (Ionin et al 2004;Goad & White 2004;Trenkic 2007;Ionin et al 2008) and the grammaticality of plural noun phrases in different semantic contexts (Serratrice et al 2009). For instance, Ionin et al (2004) found that when speakers from article-less languages (e.g., Russian and Korean) learn a language with an article system (e.g., English), they do not necessarily map the article to the correct meaning of definiteness, but rather fluctuate between the meanings of definiteness and specificity.…”