Down two steps: Are bilinguals delayed in the acquisition of recursively embedded PPs?

Abstract

The present study examines whether bilingual children are delayed in the ability to produce complex DPs. We elicited production of DPs containing two PP modifiers, in two conditions designed to tease apart the acquisition of an embedding rule from the acquisition of the recursivity of an embedding rule. In the recursive condition, one modifier PP was itself modified by an additional PP. In the non-recursive condition, both PPs sequentially modified the main noun. Participants were 71 English monolingual children and 35 bilinguals between the ages of four and six. The evidence suggested an overall difference between groups, however further analysis revealed that bilinguals differed from monolinguals only insofar as the onset of PP embedding. No specific additional bilingual delay arose from the recursive condition. This suggests that recursive embedding is a resilient domain in language acquisition and supports proposals that link morphosyntactic delays in bilingual children to domains of grammar that are heavily reliant on lexical learning, which would include learning the first instance of PP embedding.

On Recursive Modification in Child L1 French

“…In child English, recursive possessive and Prepositional Phrase (PP) structures are rare in production, and difficult to understand (Limbach and Adone 2010;Roeper 2011;Pérez-Leroux et al 2012). Despite these challenges, the acquisition of recursive modification (RM) proves to be resilient, and acquirable even under severely degraded input conditions, such as in deaf home signers (Goldin-Meadow 1982) and bilinguals (Pérez-Leroux et al 2017). The structures that can function recursively vary across different languages, fueling the controversy regarding the universality of recursion (Evans and Levinson 2009).…”