Morphosyntactic Development in Bilingual Children

Abstract

This paper addresses the morphosyntactic dcvclopment of two bilingual children and the issues raised by the controversy behveen the single system and the separate development hypotheses. Set within a generative grammar frame\vork, evidence on GermanlEnglish and LatvianlEnglish is presented from the earliest stages of language development: for the GermanlEnglish child from 2;O to 2;6, for the LatvianlEnglish child from 1;3 to 1;ll. For the GermanlEnglish data, the results show early word order patterns which are in line with the language-specific orders ofboth languages. In the LatvianlEnglish data, there is correct inflectional marking on nouns and verbs in Latvian from the earliest stagcs,contrary to the paucity ofsuch marking in English. Hence the evidence from both children supports the view that the bilingual child separates the two languages from the beginning (Separate Development Hypothesis). In addition, the data show a developmental lead-lag pattern whereby functional categories emerge first in the more inflected language (German and Latvian) and later in English.

The effect of form similarity on bilingual children's lexical development

“…Input in both languages was judged by both parents to be about equal. An investigation of her early language development shows that she was ahead in German as far as her morphosyntactic development was concerned (Sinka and Schelletter, 1998).…”

“…Recent bilingual ®rst language acquisition research concerned with the representation of the simultaneously acquired languages in children has provided evidence in favour of a separation of the two languages from very early on (Meisel, 1989;de Houwer, 1990;Gawlitzek-Maiwald and Tracy, 1996;Paradis and Genesee, 1996;Sinka and Schelletter, 1998).…”

Use of Brown's 14 Grammatical Morphemes by Bilingual Hispanic Preschoolers

“…Other researchers have promulgated opposing and/or more complex theories. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the intricacies of these theories, the reader is directed to Krashen (1981Krashen ( , 1982, Cummins (1981Cummins ( , 1984, Sinka and Schelletter (1998), Armon-Lotem (1998), and Swain (1985) for a comprehensive review.…”

GCS: A grammatical coding system for natural language data

“…Because of the centrality of functional structure in modern generative grammar, the analysis of functional categories was similarly of central importance in our study, as it has been for numerous other researchers in normal (Hyams, 1996;Radford, 1995;Sinka & Schelletter, 1998;Wexler, 1998) and impaired (e.g., Jakubowicz, Durand, Rigaut, & van der Velde, 2001; Leonard, 1998) language development. For this reason, our coding system was developed with a focus on the analysis of these items.…”