Object–verb and verb–object in Basque and Spanish monolinguals and bilinguals

Abstract

<jats:p>The aim of this article is to analyse the acquisition of object–verb/verb–object word order in Spanish and Basque by monolinguals (L1), early simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) and successive bilinguals, exposed to their second language before ages 5–6 (child L2). In this study, the second language (child L2) is acquired naturalistically, in a preschool setting with no formal instruction for the Basque L2 speakers and by environmental contact for the Spanish L2 speakers. Spanish and Basque are differentiated by their canonical word order as subject–verb–object and subject–object–verb, respectively. In Spanish, the subject–verb–object order is predominant (almost exclusive) in narrative contexts, whereas in Basque, both object–verb and verb–object word orders are possible in these contexts for pragmatic reasons, with a similar use in everyday language. The productions of a few L1 and 2L1 subjects are analysed longitudinally within the 1;06–3;00 age span. Cross-sectional data from 49 subjects who developed a child L2 are analysed at ages 5 and 8. The results reveal that the bilingual children apply the same syntactic patterns as the monolinguals in their respective languages independently of 2L1 or child L2 acquisition.</jats:p>

Basque-Spanish bilingual children’s expressive and receptive grammatical abilities

“…Studies on language development in typical bilingual Basque-speaking school-aged children can be used as a benchmark when screening for language impairment in bilingual children. In this context, the findings from the current study contribute data from experimentally-controlled sentence production and comprehension tasks to the existing literature on the grammatical abilities and error patterns of typically developing Basque-Spanish bilingual children (e.g., Austin, 2009;Barreña & Almgren 2012;Ezeizabarrena, 2012, Soto Valle & Aguado Alonso, 2015. This is especially important because child language disorders such as Specific Language Impairment (SLI) manifest themselves differently in languages with different typological properties (Leonard, 2014).…”

The Role of Cross-linguistic Influence in Bilingual Children’s Grammar Acquisition: A Review of Recent Research Evidence

“…Although logically complicated, these argumentations are clearly articulated and well instantiated with a series of case studies on several Germanic-Romance bilingual children acquiring grammatical structures that are either completely congruent (i.e., object drop), or only partially congruent (i.e., root infinitive) to the two proposed preconditions 1 1 (Müller & Hulk, 1999;Müller, 1999;Hulk and Müller;. Data analysis expectedly exhibit more omissions of obligatory objects in bilingual children"s French and Italian speech 1 Hulk and Müller (2000) explain that the phenomena of object drop and root infinitive both satisfy what is characterized in the first condition, since they are syntactically unanchored structures whose interpretations entail pragmatic information (i.e., discourse and other contextual cues). Yet contrary to the case of object drop (i.e., input of topic-drop Germanic languages reinforces the non-targetlike discourse licensing of dropping objects in Romance languages), root infinitive fail to meet the second condition because structural overlap between Romance and Germanic languages does not exist for this element, thus there is no possibility for one language to reinforce the misanalysis of structures in the other language.…”