The acquisition of English possessives by a bilingual child: Do input and usage frequency matter?

Babatsouli, Elena; Nicoladis, Elena

doi:10.1017/s0305000918000429

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…In fact, the weight of evidence to date suggests that adult bilinguals can show positive transfer even when word order varies across languages (Hatzidaki et al, 2011;Hwang et al, 2018). One case study of a bilingual child also suggested that positive transfer could occur, despite a lack of similarities in the constructions in the two languages (Babatsouli and Nicoladis, 2019). If positive transfer can occur even in the absence of similar word orders, then the form of abstract representation might be primarily in terms of function.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing Abstract Representations of Passives: Evidence From Bilingual Children’s Interpretation of Passive Constructions

Nicoladis

Sajeev

2020

Front. Psychol.

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According to usage-based theories, children initially acquire surface-level constructions and then abstract representations. If so, bilingual children might show lags relative to monolingual children early in acquisition, but not later on, once they rely on abstract representations. We tested this prediction with comprehension of passives in 3- to 6-year-old children: French–English bilinguals and English monolinguals. As predicted, younger bilingual children tended to be less accurate than monolingual children. In contrast, the older bilingual children scored equivalently to monolinguals, despite less exposure to English. When the children made errors, the bilingual children were more likely to interpret the subject as the agent of the action than the monolingual children. These results are consistent with the argument that children develop increasingly abstract representations of linguistic constructions with usage. They further suggest that bilingual children might catch up with monolingual through use of selective attention and/or a semantic bias.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing Abstract Representations of Passives: Evidence From Bilingual Children’s Interpretation of Passive Constructions

Nicoladis

Sajeev

2020

Front. Psychol.

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“…Further, the literature would benefit from longitudinal work assessing the impact of accented input on bilingual children's language development. The longitudinal case study by Babatsouli and Nicoladis (2019) is a positive indication that children can learn from non-native input over time. We also show that children do indeed learn from non-native input as confirmed by their within average range language scores.…”

Section: The Effect Of Accented Language Input On Children's Language...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Non-Native Language Input on Bilingual Children’s Language Skills

Buac,

Kaushanskaya

2023

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We assessed the impact of non-native language input on Spanish–English bilingual preschool-age children’s language skills. Most participants (96%) had language skills within the average range. We examined whether the number of native English speakers, the number of non-native English speakers, the strength of foreign accent in English, intelligibility (percent intelligible utterances), syntax/morphology (mean length of utterance in morphemes), and grammatical errors were related to children’s overall language skills. The results revealed that the number of native English speakers and intelligibility in English positively predicted children’s language skills while the number of non-native English speakers and the strength of foreign accent in English negatively predicted children’s language skills. None of the grammatical measures predicted children’s language skills. These findings indicate that non-native input can be associated with less robust language skills, but non-native input is not in fact detrimental to language development for neurotypical preschool-age children given their within-average language scores.

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“…These findings were also verified by Kaltsa et al (2020), who compared Albanian-Greek to English-Greek bilinguals on gender attribution with overall lower performance in gender agreement, especially in the case of pseudo-words and better performance in gender attribution to masculine and neuter nouns than to feminine ones. Additionally, Babatsouli and Nicoladis (2019), in a longitudinal study, examined the acquisition of English possessives by a bilingual Greek-English-speaking child and found that the acquisition of possessives in the dominant language, i.e., Greek, facilitates the acquisition of possessives (that encompass gender) in the weaker language, i.e., English. Recently, Alexiadou et al (2021) tested gender agreement in adolescent heritage speakers of Greek whose other language is English and reported that most gender mismatches are identified in noun phrase internal agreement contexts and verified that neuter is used as the learner default for L2 Greek.…”

Section: Monolingual and Bilingual Greek Speakers And The Acquisition...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Standardization of the Gender Assignment and Agreement Assessment in the Greek Language: Preliminary Evidence from Bilingual Greek—Albanian School Age Children

et al. 2023

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(1) Background: Given the scarcity of data on the psychometric evaluation of measures used with typically developing Greek-speaking bilinguals, this study aims to present preliminary evidence for the standardization and the psychometric evaluation of a gender assignment and agreement assessment designed for the Greek language (henceforth, GAAGL Assessment) employing real and pseudo-words. This is the first study to standardize the GAAGL Assessment and to explore its discriminatory ability with typical populations. (2) Methods: The assessment was designed as part of the BALED project which targeted language skills in bilingual children for whom one language is Greek. For the psychometric evaluation and the exploration of the test’s discriminatory ability we ran a Cronbach’s alpha analysis and a Youden Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis across the domains and sub scores of the test. Our sample consisted of 53 typically developing Greek monolingual children and 57 age-matched Greek–Albanian-speaking bilinguals. (3) Results: The results showed: (a) a high internal consistency for the GAAGL Assessment across its four main tasks and (b) excellent discriminatory ability, since statistically significant positive discrimination was detected between monolingual and bilingual children in the tasks and scores of the GAAGL Assessment.

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The acquisition of English possessives by a bilingual child: Do input and usage frequency matter?

Cited by 11 publications

References 42 publications

Developing Abstract Representations of Passives: Evidence From Bilingual Children’s Interpretation of Passive Constructions

Developing Abstract Representations of Passives: Evidence From Bilingual Children’s Interpretation of Passive Constructions

The Impact of Non-Native Language Input on Bilingual Children’s Language Skills

Standardization of the Gender Assignment and Agreement Assessment in the Greek Language: Preliminary Evidence from Bilingual Greek—Albanian School Age Children

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