The role of age and timing in bilingual assessment: non-word repetition, subject-verb agreement and case marking in L1 and eL2 children with and without SLI

Developmental patterns of non-word repetition by monolingual and bilingual school-aged children

PURPOSE

The present study examines cross-sectional trends in performance on a quasi-universal non-word repetition (NWR) task. It also considers whether NWR performance is dependent on levels of exposure to a language and compares the performance of bilingual children across their two languages.

METHOD

A cross-sectional design was employed. The English and French quasi-universal NWR tasks, featuring stimuli from two to five syllables in length, was administered to Canadian school-aged monolinguals and two groups of bilinguals: those who encountered their second language in early childhood and those who encountered their second language at school entry.

RESULT

When evaluated in English, the early-exposure bilinguals produced significantly fewer errors than the school-entry exposure bilinguals and the English monolingual groups. When evaluated in French, the early-exposure bilinguals and the French monolinguals produced significantly fewer errors than the school-entry exposure bilinguals. Compared across languages, the French monolinguals produced fewer errors on the French version of the NWR task than the English monolinguals did on the English version of the same task. In both languages and across all analyses, the youngest age group (7-8 years) produced more errors than the two older groups (9-10 years and 11-12 years).

CONCLUSION

The quasi-universal NWR task showed sensitivity to improvements from 7 to 11 years of age in English and up to 9 years of age in French. Better performance in French may be due to the relatively greater frequency of multisyllabic words in that language. The development and use of this particular NWR task with monolinguals and bilinguals-in both of their languages-contribute to a deeper understanding of quasi-universal NWR performance in typically developing children.

Ditransitive structures in child language acquisition: An investigation of production and comprehension in children aged five to seven

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acquisition of ditransitive structures beyond production. We conducted an elicitation task (production) and a picture-sentence matching task measuring accuracy and response times (comprehension). We examined German five-to seven-year-old typically developing children and an adult control group. Our data showed quasi-perfect performance in comprehension in adults and in those children who had already mastered ditransitives productively. However, children who had not yet mastered the production of ditransitives showed comprehension abilities preceding production abilities. Unlike adults, in the comprehension task children did not react explicitly before the end of the auditory stimulus.

The Bilingual Native Speaker Competence: Evidence From Explicit and Implicit Language Knowledge Using Elicited Production, Sentence-Picture Matching, and Pupillometry

The present pilot study investigated potential effects of early and late child bilingualism in highly proficient adult bilinguals. It has been shown that some early second language (eL2) speakers stagnate when it comes to complex linguistic phenomena and that they display subtle difficulties in adulthood. Therefore, we have chosen the complex structure of double object constructions. We investigate the long-term achievement in a combined-method approach using elicited production, explicit comprehension by sentence-picture matching and a measure of implicit linguistic knowledge, namely pupillometry. This eye tracking method is suitable for measuring implicit reactions of the pupils to unexpected or ungrammatical stimuli. For production, ditransitive structures were elicited by means of a game. For comprehension, a sentence-picture matching task was conducted. Two pictures were shown on a monitor that were equal with respect to the involved objects, but the thematic roles of direct and indirect objects were interchanged. Items were controlled for length, gender, animacy, semantic likelihood and word order. Reaction times and accuracy scores were analyzed. To this end, N = 18 bilingual adult speakers of German (+ another language, mean age: 26.5) with different ages of onset participated in this study and were compared to N = 26 monolingual German adult speakers (mean age 23.9). All participants had a proficiency of German above 89% correct in placement and cloze tests. Results show fully comparable productive and comprehensive competencies in monolinguals and bilinguals including the reaction times in the sentence-picture matching task and a word order effect on the reaction times in both groups. In the pupillometry task, we found monolinguals and bilinguals to be sensitive to differing conditions with respect to grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. However, we find between group differences in pupil dilations in that bilinguals react differently to strong grammatical violations than monolinguals. These results are discussed with respect to the term of native speaker competence and the variation within both groups.