Older age of onset in child L2 acquisition can be facilitative: evidence from the acquisition of English passives by Spanish natives

Abstract

A project of this nature and size involves the cooperation of many people to whom we are indebted and owe much gratitude. We wish to thank all the children and their parents for their enthusiasm and participation over the years; it was a pleasure to see your development and growth-much more than just in your language. To the teachers and especially the administration at the Colegio Berchmans, we cannot thank you enough. Finally and most notably, a very large thank you to Eliana Herrera Laguna, the director of bilingual education at Colegio Berchmans, whose love for these children and belief in using scientific research to support bilingual education are inspiring. This article is for all of you. We are also very grateful for the funding for this project, which came over the years from the University of Iowa, the University of Florida and the University of Reading. Many research assistants over the course of the 5 years of the project contributed to the processing of the data, specifically the transcripts of the interviews at the outset of the project and we are of course thankful for their help. Many colleagues have offered helpful advice and comments as we have presented the various stages of the data collection at conferences over the years; we thank them all, but wish to point out that conversations with Ianthi Tsimpli, Roumyana Slabakova, Loes Koring, and Nina Hyams proved especially helpful at various stages. Any and all errors are inadvertent and completely our own. AbstractWe report a longitudinal comprehension study of (long) passive constructions in two native-Spanish child groups differing by age of initial exposure to L2 English (young group: 3;0-4;0 years; older group: 6;0-7;0 years); where amount of input, L2 exposure environment, and socio-economic status are controlled. Data from a forced-choice task show that both groups comprehend active sentences, not passives, initially (after 3.6 years of exposure). One year later, both groups improve, but only the older group reaches ceiling on both actives and passives. Two years from initial testing, the younger group catches up. Input alone cannot explain why the younger group takes 5years to accomplish what the older group does in 4. We claim that some properties take longer to acquire at certain ages because language development is partially constrained by general cognitive and linguistic development (e.g. de

How language environment, age, and cognitive capacity support the bilingual development of Syrian refugee children recently arrived in Canada

“…The limited impact could be due to many children having limited or no schooling in Arabic. It is relevant to ask why older age was not associated with stronger L2 outcomes, in contrast to previous research (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011;Golberg et al, 2008;Paradis, 2011;Rothman et al, 2016). Perhaps the cognitive capacity variance due to older age was specified mainly by MAT; there was a moderate correlation between MAT and age (Table 3).…”

“…Age, Cognitive Factors, and Bilingual Development Not only language environment factors, but also child-internal factors, such as age of L2 acquisition onset (AOA) and cognitive capacities, influence bilingual development. Studies that have controlled for the amount of L2 input have shown that older AOA within the early childhood years is associated with more advanced L2 development in vocabulary and morphosyntax for children in L2-majority contexts (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011;Golberg et al, 2008;Paradis, 2011), as well as for children in instructed L2 contexts (Rothman et al, 2016). These researchers hypothesized that the older-learner advantage is likely due to beginning L2 acquisition with greater linguistic and cognitive maturity.…”

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

“…Evidence for parallels between child L2 and adult L2 has been reported for passive in German (Wegener, 1998) and for verb-second and subject-verb agreement in German (Haberzettl, 2005; Rothweiler, 2006; Chilla, 2008). However, in a study on passives in English, Rothman et al (2016) found that child L2 learners outperformed children with an age of onset of 4 to 5 years which they attributed to so-called conceptual transfer from the L1 to the learners’ L2. Many studies on eL2 acquisition (age of onset of 3 to 4 years) have found parallels between eL2 and monolingual children.…”

Language assessment tools for Arabic-speaking heritage and refugee children in Germany

“…Clearly, cognitive and linguistic factors will interact at schoolage, where working memory and other cognitive functions have developed, whereas specific discovery mechanisms may no longer be easily available (Meisel, 2009), and language is not only learned by naturalistic exposure but also crucially in a classroom environment. It has been shown that the acquisition of the lexicon (Goldberg, Paradis, & Crago, 2008) and of complex constructions, such as passive (Rothman et al, 2016), proceeds faster in older than in younger children due to their greater cognitive resources. Because of the greater variation described for adult L2 development (see Birdsong, 2018, for an overview) and also for late child L2, other factors such as length of exposure (LoE) or working memory capacities have been explored (Farnia & Geva, 2011;Paradis, 2011).…”