“I Readed the Book Last Week.” The Role of Dominant Language, Receptive Vocabulary and Language Structure on Morphosyntactic Awareness in Monolingual and Heritage Language Children

Abstract

In this research, 5- and 6-year-old monolingual (English) and heritage language (English–Spanish, English–Urdu) children completed a grammaticality judgment test to assess their awareness of grammatically correct and incorrect morphosyntactic structures in English. Results demonstrated that language group differences were minimized when heritage language children exhibited average receptive vocabulary proficiency for the sample, and when more difficult morphosyntactic structures were assessed. In this middle range, only two group differences were found. Our findings highlight the need to consider factors such as receptive vocabulary when assessing morphosyntactic awareness and language group differences.

Examination of monolingual (English) and bilingual (English/Spanish; English/Urdu) children's syntactic awareness

“…Past research, however, has shown inconsistent findings with regard to monolingualbilingual differences on measures of syntactic awareness. Some studies have shown bilingual advantages (e.g., Bialystok, 2007;Cromdal, 1999;Davidson et al, 2010), whereas other studies have shown bilingual advantages for only certain groups of bilingual children (i.e., highly proficient bilinguals: Davidson et al, 2017). In contrast, additional studies have shown that bilingual children perform more poorly than monolingual children (e.g., Da Fontoura & Siegel, 1995;Lipka et al, 2005).…”

“…In contrast, additional studies have shown that bilingual children perform more poorly than monolingual children (e.g., Da Fontoura & Siegel, 1995;Lipka et al, 2005). A number of reasons have been postulated to explain these inconsistencies in findings, including the possibility that fewer monolingual-bilingual differences are found when bilingual children are tested in their dominant language and show sufficient levels of receptive vocabulary ability in that language (Davidson et al, 2010(Davidson et al, , 2017. The present study suggests that an even more complicated picture may exist.…”

“…Syntactic awareness, along with other metalinguistic skills (e.g., morphological and phonological awareness), are initially present at an implicit level, or 'epilinguistic level' (Gaux & Gombert, 1999;Gombert, 1992Gombert, , 2003; see also Davidson, Vanegas, Hilvert, & Misiunaite, 2017). These epilinguistic abilities are organized and stored in long-term memory, although young children may not be consciously aware of them (Simard, Labelle, & Bergeron, 2017).…”

“…Finally, these findings appear to extend beyond syntactic awareness abilities to other metalinguistic abilities as well. For example, Davidson et al (2017) found that, for morphosyntactic awareness, language group differences between monolingual (English) and bilingual children (English/Spanish, English/Urdu) were minimized when bilingual children exhibited at least average receptive vocabulary proficiency and when more difficult morphosyntactic structures were assessed.…”

“…According to Gombert (1992Gombert ( , 1999 and others (Tunmer & Grieve, 1984), the ability to judge sentences as grammatical, such as that shown on the grammatical judgment task, is episyntactic in nature because the judgment may be based on the dissonance of the utterance within the pragmatic or semantic context, rather than on conscious reflection about syntax per se. Others, however, have accepted the grammaticality judgment task as metasyntactic in nature, at least under several conditions, such as when a child must not only detect, but also explain grammatical errors (Davidson et al, 2017;Simard et al, 2013).…”