Early child second language acquisition: French gender in German children

Meisel, Jürgen M.

doi:10.1017/s1366728916000237

Cited by 40 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Investigating the effects of age on onset and of input in grammatical gender in Greek (early) and Dutch (very late), Unsworth et al (2014) found that amount of input was a predictive factor for the pattern attested in both Greek and in Dutch, whereas age of onset could explain the differences between 2L1 and successive bilinguals in Greek, but – as predicted by the timing hypothesis – not in Dutch. Likewise, the age of onset effects found by Meisel (2016) for gender in French, which is acquired early, are in line with the timing hypothesis. Furthermore, in a study with school-aged eL2 children acquiring English with a mean age of onset of 3 years, Chondrogianni and Marinis (2011) found effects of length of exposure rather than of age of onset for the acquisition of the late acquired structures wh-questions and passives.…”

Section: Factors Influencing Child Bilingual Acquisitionsupporting

confidence: 85%

The Age Factor Revisited: Timing in Acquisition Interacts With Age of Onset in Bilingual Acquisition

Schulz

Grimm

2019

Front. Psychol.

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In this paper, we investigate whether timing in monolingual acquisition interacts with age of onset and input effects in child bilingualism. Six different morpho-syntactic and semantic phenomena acquired early, late or very late are considered, with their timing in L1 acquisition varying between age 3 (subject-verb agreement) and after age 6 (case marking). Data from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) whose mean age of onset to German was 3 months are compared with data from early second language learners of German (eL2) whose mean age of onset to German was 35 months as well as with data from monolingual children. To explore change over time, children were tested twice at the ages of 4;4 and 5;8 years. The main findings were that 2L1 children had an advantage over their eL2 peers in early acquired phenomena, which disappeared with time, whereas in late acquired phenomena 2L1 and eL2 children did not differ. Moreover, 2L1 children performed like monolingual children in early acquired phenomena but had a disadvantage in the late acquired phenomena with the amount of delay decreasing with time. We conclude that age of onset effects are modulated by effects of timing in monolingual acquisition. Contrary to expectation, input in terms of language dominance, measured as the dominant language used at home, did not affect simultaneous bilingual children’s performance in any of the phenomena. We discuss the implications of our findings for the hypothesis that acquisition of late phenomena is determined by input alone and suggest an alternative concept: the learner’s internal need for time to master a phenomenon, which is determined by its complexity and cross-linguistic robustness.

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Section: Factors Influencing Child Bilingual Acquisitionsupporting

confidence: 85%

The Age Factor Revisited: Timing in Acquisition Interacts With Age of Onset in Bilingual Acquisition

Schulz

Grimm

2019

Front. Psychol.

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“…Sometimes, these findings are argued to be consistent with the notion of a sensitive period after which native-like acquisition gradually becomes impossible. Meisel's (2018) study is representative of this view. He studies similarities and differences between (2)L1 and cL2 acquisition, claiming that AoO is crucial in determining the course and result of early bilingualism.…”

Section: Introduction: Recent Developments In Early Bilingualismmentioning

confidence: 89%

INTRODUCTION: Recent developments in early bilingualism

Kupisch

2018

Bilingualism

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This Special Issue (SI) is dedicated to early bilinguals, who acquire two languages during early childhood, before age 6, simultaneously (2L1 bilinguals) or sequentially (cL2 bilinguals). Recently, the notion of heritage speakers (HSs) − bilinguals who grow up speaking a minority language at home − has become prominent in this context. HS research has typically targeted bilinguals at a mature (adult) state, but early developing bilinguals may of course be HSs too, though not uniformly labelled as such. HSs of a moribund language or variety are another type of early bilingual, representing the final or penultimate, often 4th or 5th, generation of speakers. Unfortunately, ‘deficiency’ or ‘incompleteness’ is a common thread linking much HS research − despite a wealth of evidence demonstrating HSs’ maintenance of complexity in many grammatical domains along with differences to monolinguals (see, e.g., Kupisch & Rothman, 2016; Putnam & Sánchez, 2013). This SI brings together studies on how and why the morphosyntax and phonology of early bilinguals might differ from that of monolinguals.

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“…As regards the role of AoA, Meisel (2018), examining grammatical gender in bilingual French/German children, found that children with an age-of-onset of acquisition before 3;6 produce the same constructions, proceed through the same developmental sequences, and attain the same grammatical system as monolingual children. For sequential bilingual children with a later AoA of the second language, this was not the case.…”

Section: Morphological Production In Bilingual Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do bilingual children lag behind? A study of morphological encoding using ERPs

Clahsen

Jessen

2019

J. Child Lang.

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The current study investigates how bilingual children encode and produce morphologically complex words. We employed a silent-production-plus-delayed-vocalization paradigm in which event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during silent encoding of inflected words which were subsequently cued to be overtly produced. The bilingual children's spoken responses and their ERPs were compared to previous datasets from monolingual children on the same task. We found an enhanced negativity for regular relative to irregular forms during silent production in both bilingual children's languages, replicating the ERP effect previously obtained from monolingual children. Nevertheless, the bilingual children produced more morphological errors (viz. over-regularizations) than monolingual children. We conclude that mechanisms of morphological encoding (as measured by ERPs) are parallel for bilingual and monolingual children, and that the increased over-regularization rates are due to their reduced exposure to each of the two languages (relative to monolingual children).

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Early child second language acquisition: French gender in German children

Cited by 40 publications

References 54 publications

The Age Factor Revisited: Timing in Acquisition Interacts With Age of Onset in Bilingual Acquisition

The Age Factor Revisited: Timing in Acquisition Interacts With Age of Onset in Bilingual Acquisition

INTRODUCTION: Recent developments in early bilingualism

Do bilingual children lag behind? A study of morphological encoding using ERPs

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