Placeholders in the English Interlanguage of Bilingual (Basque/Spanish) Children

Abstract

In this article we provide an explanation for 2 syntactic phenomena whose systematic production has been observed in the English nonnative grammar of 3 different age groups of 58 bilingual (Basque/Spanish) children after 4 years of exposure to English in a formal setting: Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. The research reported here is part of a larger longitudinal study on the English interlanguage of bilingual (Basque/Spanish) children. We wish to acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education through research project PS95-0025 and from the University of the Basque Country through research project UPV 103.130-HA011/99. We also wish to thank the Department of Modern Languages, the Faculty of Arts, and the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies of the University of Ottawa. Thanks also go to Vicente Nú ñ ez Antón (Departmentof Econometrics and Statistics, Universityof the BasqueCountry) for his assistance with the statistical analysis and to Marco Llamazares for proofreadingthemanuscript.Wearegratefultotwoanonymousreviewersfortheir invaluable comments and suggestions. A preliminary version of this article was presented at

Grammaticalité des formes verbales en production lors de l'apprentissage précoce de l'anglais langue étrangère : un enseignement intégré fait-il une différence à l'école primaire?

“…This U-shaped patterned distribution is related mainly to errors with the simple present -s form. In our corpus, the overgeneralization of the present simple inflection occurs mainly in the context of coordinated subjects (e.g., in picture four the boy and the girl goes to the forest and # to camp there are two cows and it's sunny ), which further corroborates Lázaro Ibarrola's (2012) claim that the development of verb morphology in EFL by Spanish L1 learners is conditioned by the mastery of the pronominalreferential paradigm (also García Mayo, Lázaro Ibarrola and Liceras (2005)). The present simple inflection is also used in past contexts, in substitution of the irregular past form and as an agreement marker (e.g., and in the end in number six he see [//] they see that in the nest do not have the breakfast the dog eats).…”

“…At a closer look, the surprisingly high number of errors at this data collection time is related to the overgeneralisation of the copulative be which is used as a placeholder for the irregular past form of the verb eat (e.g., he saw their dog is eat all the sandwiches). This phenomenon was also observed by Ionin and Wexler (2002) in early ESL and by García Mayo, Lázaro Ibarrola and Liceras (2005) in early EFL and represents a substitute tense marking strategy. Errors are more representative of the use of affixal morphology, in particular in the non-CLIL group.…”

Neurolinguistic measures of typological effects in multilingual transfer: introducing an ERP methodology

“… 1 There is, of course, notable work in generative L3 studies that investigate interlanguage development, regressive transfer effects in development and competence at later stages of acquisition such as, for example, García Mayo et al (2005) , Cabrelli Amaro and Rothman (2010) , García Mayo and Villarreal Olaizola (2011) , Cabrelli Amaro (2013) , Slabakova and García Mayo (2015) . …”

The acquisition of L3 English negation by bilingual (Spanish/Basque) learners in an institutional setting

“…On the contrary, older learners benefit from a type of instruction that places great emphasis on explicit grammar instruction and correction. This would explain the differences between group III and the rest of the groups, as well as the significant development found in group II between the ages of 12 and 14 (see also García Mayo et al, 2005, 2006. Thus, when the focus is on a specific morphosyntactic phenomenon, as is the case with negation in this study, it is not surprising that older learners outperform younger ones.…”

“…The older groups, however, are aware of the presence of auxiliary do but their preference to use it together with the contracted negative marker (forming a single lexical unit), as well as the persistence of agreement and tense marking problems indicate that they have not restructured the order of projections. Thus, the differences among the groups are explained by two processes: L1 transfer and incorporation of L2 lexical items (see García Mayo et al 2005, 2006 for a similar account).…”