Mandarin–Italian Dual-Language Children’s Comprehension of Head-Final and Head-Initial Relative Clauses

Abstract

The acquisition of languages by children using two languages is a matter of debate as many factors contribute to the success of this type of acquisition. We focus on how the competence of dual-language children changes in their two languages as a function of length of exposure and establish whether there are reciprocal influences during language development. We examined the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in a group of 6-year-old (younger) and 8-year-old (older) Mandarin-Italian dual-language children. After 3 years of regular and intensive exposure to Italian, the younger group reached the same level of competence in the comprehension of relative clauses in their two languages, and after 5 years of exposure to Italian, the older group had a better comprehension of relative clauses in Italian than in Mandarin. Acquiring two languages leads to bidirectional influence, beyond a reciprocal support. Finally, some penalty may be observed in the acquisition of subject head-final relative clauses, which is not evident in that of subject head-initial relative clauses.

The comprehension of relative clauses in Mandarin Children with suspected specific language impairment

“…As pointed out by one anonymous reviewer, Hu, Costa and Guasti (2020) found that when bilingual children did not comprehend object RCs, they were more likely to make embedded Errors (Middle errors in this paper) in Mandarin; whereas, in this paper, children with SLI were prone to making reversal errors when they had trouble interpreting Mandarin object RCs. This discrepancy will be investigated further in the future.…”